Off Topic Politics Thread

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Tax would still be due on the profits of the trades so you need to be careful of your wording as you imply that by creating a ltd company they avoided paying tax and that wouldn't be the case
As business that they are a trader for they pay tax on the EOY business profits.
 
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Tax would still be due on the profits of the trades so you need to be careful of your wording as you imply that by creating a ltd company they avoided paying tax and that wouldn't be the case
There was a case bought be HMRC that established that there has to be a transaction in fact whereby actual goods or services were invoiced. I don't know if that's still in place doing the books is happily in the past although managing pensions is a bit of a pain at times.
 
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There was a case bought be HMRC that established that there has to be a transaction in fact whereby actual goods or services were invoiced. I don't know if that's still in place doing the books is happily in the past although managing pensions is a bit of a pain at times.
I think there was a high profile case where HMRC went after Saint Lineker for 4m or something to do with this.
 
Dipping my toe into this thread is like learning to swim in a piranha tank but that is a fairly simplistic statement that does more harm than good.

I operated (and still have) a company like that from my time as a software contractor and it wasn't for tax avoidance purposes. I paid tax via the company in corporation tax, I paid VAT via the company on things I bought to run the company, I charged VAT too but i operated on very little outgoings as I didn't need to buy supplies etc so it was negligable benefit to me), I paid tax on anything I took out of the business to me personally.

A really rough comparison on an "income" of 100K (makes the figures easier) - I exclude VAT as in most case what I charged wasn't offset by what I bought and it went straight into my VAT payments.

1. From that 100K I pay my expenses (business banking fees, accountant, filing charges, regus workplace etc) of about 3.5K, PAYE my tax free allowance of 12,570, I then pay the low rate of corporation tax (19%) on the remainder which leaves a company profit of just under 68K - I than pay 33% tax on that to take it out as a dividend leaving me with with a "take home" of 58K (remainder plus PAYE) - of course there is more detail in what is paid out around having pensions, etc but that's the gist of it.

2. If I earned 100K PAYE after deduction my take home would be 68.5K (using an online calculator) but this is not taking into account pensions etc so depending on your contribution level you could be shaving a few thousand of this figure.

My reasons for it were not to make more money, it was that I wanted to have more say in what types of work I was doing and for who and when I worked. Also the vast majority of companies that wanted my services just couldn't pay individuals for short term contract work without that individual becoming employees of the company and am I going to become an employee of that company for 4-8 works of work and then move to become an employee elsewhere again and again with all the tax admin of constant job changes. Especially if I was fulfilling one small aspect of a much larger project as a sub contractor for a larger development firm in parallel to other work.

Covid increased this by the fact we were forced to work remotely and I could work for companies that previously I wouldn't have entertained due to location (and those companies could attract talent they wouldn't have been able to before). Covid actually started to put pressure on the contract rates as surely working from home meant I had less expenses and could afford to be paid less (and that still hasn't recovered in some sections).

They recently (and poorly) attempted to make this more stringent with implied employment rules so in a lot of cases there is almost no difference in being employed or contracted for purposes of how much tax is paid for a large portion of those using the system.

Do I think HMRC make just about everything more complex than it needs to be, definitely, and I truly think that the system is not set up to be fair to the majority of people in comparison to the top minority (a tax of wealth would benefit everyone if done right).

But to label a currently legal method of operation as en-masse "tax avoidance" is not a true representation of the situation for the vast amount of people doing it.

I do allow for the fact that in any system there will be people using the system for illegal gains but that is what the enforcement elements of the tax service are there for - to ensure that the current law is applied correctly and punish those that don't pay what they owe correctly.

Please be gentle in your responses (I am still a politics thread newbie)....


This is more or less exactly what I used to do when I worked for a US company - not for tax avoidance, but to actually have a means of being paid and paying tax on it. It wasn't a fake company set up to avoid tax, as mentioned a couple of pages ago (apology for that comment has been noted and accepted btw)

I did find myself slightly better off that way though as now my whole income is PAYE (not just the 12.75k and the rest as dividends/corp tax.

As you mention it is a perfectly legal way and actually the accepted HMRC way of doing it, Nothing underhand at all. PIA in some ways as you say as you have to pay an accountant/tax advisor etc, rather than just getting paid every month.
 
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It also allows the customers to obtain skill sets for short periods of time at an overall lower cost without the need to create a recruitment pipeline (which I've done a few times) to employ someone to do the tasks in a field they may not necessarily be equipped to recruit effectively in.

The customer isn't paying the recruitment costs (which can be high) and then not paying the employer's contributions for NI, PAYE, pensions etc on top of the salary - means they can offer a better contract rate but still be under the cost of the employee.

Quite frankly none of the large software projects I worked on would have been done in the timescale and / or budgets without the flexibility of contract work and I'm pretty sure that applies to other fields too.
 
It also allows the customers to obtain skill sets for short periods of time at an overall lower cost without the need to create a recruitment pipeline (which I've done a few times) to employ someone to do the tasks in a field they may not necessarily be equipped to recruit effectively in.

The customer isn't paying the recruitment costs (which can be high) and then not paying the employer's contributions for NI, PAYE, pensions etc on top of the salary - means they can offer a better contract rate but still be under the cost of the employee.

Quite frankly none of the large software projects I worked on would have been done in the timescale and / or budgets without the flexibility of contract work and I'm pretty sure that applies to other fields too.

Do the same arguments hold for hosting a TV show? I thought the BBC had stopped it but GBB seem happy to continue with the practice.
 
I had to double check. Reform are ****ing bonkers allowing this.
"A vaccine-sceptic doctor has told the Reform UK conference that COVID vaccines contributed to cancer in the royal family - to criticisms of "extremism" from the health secretary and condemnation from experts.

Dr Aseem Malhotra spent around a quarter of an hour presenting a series of claims on the main stage of the conference in Birmingham - with thousands present in the crowd.

Dr Malhotra, who described himself as a friend of controversial US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, said hundreds of studies showed the harms of mRNA vaccines.

He went on to say that he agreed with another doctor that "it's highly likely that the COVID vaccines have been a factor, a significant factor, in the cancer of members of the royal family."
 
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Do the same arguments hold for hosting a TV show? I thought the BBC had stopped it but GBB seem happy to continue with the practice.
what's GBB?

If it's an acronym for a show it could be that the BBC didn't actually produce it themselves and just buy it from another production company (a number of shows are made this way). If so then the rules that the BBC apply to their own productions won't be applicable and it's down to how the production company works with it's own contracts etc. The BBC has a slightly different position to most companies in that there is an element of public oversight and scrutiny which means that they may not be able to operate in certain ways or with companies from geo / political regions etc.

It's not my main field so can't really comment more on media contracts outside of the generalist view of how a services company would operate.
 
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Do the same arguments hold for hosting a TV show? I thought the BBC had stopped it but GBB seem happy to continue with the practice.
BBC ITV and CH4 stopped it as far as I know, most likely due to the public pressure when they were disclosing their highest paid earners which didn't take into account any payments made to those earner's companies!

I think it was the BBC that went that way and the other 2 followed suit. They still do the whole "we buy the show, its not ours" thing though.
 
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Anyone else here with foreign born spouses or themselves born abroad starting to feel a bit twitchy at the way things are developing?

Got to say although this stuff isn't necessarily a surprise I am starting to feel quite on edge with the speed of it all.

I know the focus is on boat crossings and hotels at the moment, but history tells us how this stuff tends to develop. Some of the conversations I have had recently have been quite shocking to me.

Yesterday's normalcy was 'all muslims must be banned from government' (someone who was very displeased at Shabana Mahmood being the Home Secretary).
 
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Anyone else here with foreign born spouses or themselves born abroad starting to feel a bit twitchy at the way things are developing?

Got to say although this stuff isn't necessarily a surprise I am starting to feel quite on edge with the speed of it all.

I know the focus is on boat crossings and hotels at the moment, but we history tells us how this stuff develops. Some of the conversations I have had recently have been quite shocking to me.

Yesterday's normalcy was 'all muslims must be banned from government'.
I have seen a marked increase in videos of racist abuse of anyone not white. There was the guy being interviewed by Sky News and some passing ‘patriots’ started telling him to go home and he wasn’t wanted here. He was British Asian. There was the guy in Portsmouth swinging a knife about outside a Mosque telling them he had to protect the women.

This is the thing about the current bout of flag flying. It is not patriotism. It is hate. If people want to normalise flag flying, don’t do it alongside a ‘shut the hotels’ campaign.
 
Anyone else here with foreign born spouses or themselves born abroad starting to feel a bit twitchy at the way things are developing?

Got to say although this stuff isn't necessarily a surprise I am starting to feel quite on edge with the speed of it all.

I know the focus is on boat crossings and hotels at the moment, but history tells us how this stuff tends to develop. Some of the conversations I have had recently have been quite shocking to me.

Yesterday's normalcy was 'all muslims must be banned from government'.

If Reform gets into power, the scale of mistakes they'd make with deportations would be staggering. They’re claiming they can remove 600,000 people in four years — the equivalent of an entire city the size of Bristol. Where exactly are the numerous or massive concentration camps meant to go? The costs to taxpayers would be astronomical. And since this is their flagship policy, they can’t simply outsource it; they’d have to own it. In practice, it would mean creating a state police force and massively expanding the state — ironic for a party that brands itself as ‘small government.
 
THB I think everybody wants the asylum hotels shut. They're only their because of the Tory's numerous failures regards handling immigration
Stage managed societal rage. Let’s slow down processing, sack the experts and replace them with cheap workers, and instead focus our efforts on Rwanda. And Labour are ****ed as they have this policy of dealing with everything in a‘Grown up’ way.
 
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If Reform gets into power, the scale of mistakes they'd make with deportations would be staggering. They’re claiming they can remove 600,000 people in four years — the equivalent of an entire city the size of Bristol. Where exactly are the numerous or massive concentration camps meant to go? The costs to taxpayers would be astronomical. And since this is their flagship policy, they can’t simply outsource it; they’d have to own it. In practice, it would mean creating a state police force and massively expanding the state — ironic for a party that brands itself as ‘small government.
Where the hell are they going to send them to? Even if they resurrect the catastrophic Rwanda scheme, that was only going to accommodate 250 people iirc, so they’re going to have to do deals with a lot more countries to take 600,000. And any deal is likely to have some kind of quid pro quo attached, which might very well involve accepting, yes you guessed it, some immigrants.
 
Anyone else here with foreign born spouses or themselves born abroad starting to feel a bit twitchy at the way things are developing?

Got to say although this stuff isn't necessarily a surprise I am starting to feel quite on edge with the speed of it all.

I know the focus is on boat crossings and hotels at the moment, but history tells us how this stuff tends to develop. Some of the conversations I have had recently have been quite shocking to me.

Yesterday's normalcy was 'all muslims must be banned from government' (someone who was very displeased at Shabana Mahmood being the Home Secretary).

In a case of amazing timing, just went to Sainsburys Lordshill where 'THIS IS OUR LAND' is spray painted on the car wash, also 'Save R Kids' on the pub.

Its a failure of the state to educate the population at the end of the day, but I have had to calm down a bit to get to that point to put it mildly.
 
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In a case of amazing timing, just went to Sainsburys Lordshill where 'THIS IS OUR LAND' is spray painted on the car wash, also 'Save R Kids'.

Its a failure of the state to educate the population at the end of the day, but I have had to calm down a bit to get to that point to put it mildly.
We did try to argue it was going this way…
 
Where the hell are they going to send them to? Even if they resurrect the catastrophic Rwanda scheme, that was only going to accommodate 250 people iirc, so they’re going to have to do deals with a lot more countries to take 600,000. And any deal is likely to have some kind of quid pro quo attached, which might very well involve accepting, yes you guessed it, some immigrants.
They have a “great” role model in the orange one as he has done this already.
 
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