Let’s say you are a company employing two people, each receiving a substantial salary. It may occur to you that if you split yourself up into two companies, each employing one person, then you can claim two lots of Employment Allowance. Why stop there? Why not have every employee with his or her own company?
VAT returns for the Quarter ended 30 April 2015
are due for submission by 7th June 2015. Any net VAT which is payable is due to be paid electronically by the same deadline date.
Company Accounts to 31st August 2014
The financial statements of private companies in their second and subsequent years of business with a year end of 31st August 2014 need to be submitted to Companies House by 31st May 2015. The corporation tax payment for a small company with the same year end needs to be made by 1st June 2015 in order to avoid Late Payment Interest.
P60s
should be given to all employees who were still on the payroll at 5th April 2015. The deadline to do this is May 31st, but it may help with good staff relations if this were done now. Some employees will need the P60 for mortgage or student loan applications.
Taxing the Multinationals
If I run a coffee shop where I make a standard profit per cup, and I face competition from another shop across the street which makes the same profit per cup, then I would expect both of us to be paying the same tax per cup. If it turns out that the other shop is part of a multinational chain which only pays tax when it feels like it, then I am entitled to put that down to the incompetence of our tax collectors. This does matter because money not paid in tax is available for reinvestment in a more attractive shop, better coffee-making machinery, and more staff training, so a lighter tax burden for a competitor is blatantly unfair.
Overnight Batch Processing
If you ask a computer to do a job, much of its resources are expended upon interacting with you rather than actually doing the job, and in the days when there was a shortage of computer power, this was an issue. The solution was to put your job in a queue and do it overnight along with a batch of similar jobs. This is called batch processing and it is more efficient than trying to serve everybody at once.
Getting Tax Back from the Revenue
One effect of the Construction Industry Scheme for many businesses in the building trade is that they will pay too much tax during the year, and will need to claim a refund at the year end. Companies often have a loss to carry back to a previous year, and they may also claim a refund of corporation tax.
Death Duties
Reading through the handouts of various election candidates, it would appear timely to remind accountants of the different types of death duty that may be encountered. Suppose a person dies and leaves ten million pounds to five children, who each receive £2,000,000. There are two types of death duty that may be charged.
Forming a Government
Income tax is an annual tax which requires a new Finance Act every year. Opposition parties in Parliament usually vote against the Finance Act, but the Government always wins by virtue of its overall majority. Since the Finance Act is a money bill, it then goes straight for Royal Assent, bypassing the House of Lords.
A Law to Ban Tax Rises?
This sounds like a wonderful idea, but how exactly would it work? Suppose that a busload of MPs goes over a cliff. We have 78 by-elections, and 78 new MPs. A basic principle of our Constitution, if not of logic itself, is that no one can dictate to these MPs how they will vote when they get to Parliament. Income tax is an annual tax for which the authority to raise it has to be renewed every year. It is not possible to dictate to any of these new MPs, or to any existing MP for that matter, how they will vote. In the case of other taxes, such as VAT, Parliament could resolve to determine the VAT rate at the start of a new Parliament, and not to review it, but there can still be a palace revolution after which the new regime changes it.