Note: for ease (and efficiency in terms word count), throughout this post I will use the term “Accountant” to encompass a financial accountant and/or tax adviser. In the interests of openness, I should also make it quite clear that I am a Chartered Tax Adviser and a Chartered Accountant. Professional titles such as Doctor [...]
George Osborne announced today that he is increasing the rate of R&D tax relief for both SMEs and large companies. The new rates, which will apply to expenditure incurred on or after 1 April 2015, are 230% for SMEs (up from 225%) and 11% for large companies claiming the R&D Expenditure Credit (up from 10%). [...]
Chris Moyles's attempts to reduce his tax liability are all over the press right now. However, if you're interested in the facts, the decision can be read here. To be fair, Moyles wasn't the only one who sought to use this scheme but he is, apparently, well known, so the press have chosen to focus [...]
Short history R&D tax relief for large companies was introduced in 2002, two years after it was introduced for SMEs. The headline rate of that relief is now 130% (i.e. an additional deduction of 30% on top of the normal 100% deduction for trading expenditure). From 1 April 2013 a new form of R&D relief [...]
HM Treasury has published the Draft Clauses and Explanatory Notes for FB 2014. Now, I can live with the fact that that this document contains 673 pages - "simplification" seems to involve more and more legislation each year. However, why on earth was it not possible - once again - to include a simple table [...]
Has anyone actually read Michael Meacher's United Kingdom Corporate and Individual Tax and Financial Transparency Bill? I say it's Michael Meacher's Bill because he is the principal MP sponsoring it through the House of Commons. It was actually written, according to the claims on his blog, by Richard Murphy. I have to confess that, until [...]
Richard Murphy's Fair Tax Campaign is now dismissing genuine incentives such as the new Patent Box as being "state-sanctioned tax avoidance". Excuse me? What exactly does "state-sanctioned tax avoidance" mean? Fair Tax Campaign's own definition of tax avoidance is "seeking to minimise a tax bill without deliberate deception (which would be tax evasion) but in [...]
Employees or EPWs When the research and development relief (R&D) legislation was introduced in April 2000, relief was only available for the qualifying costs of the claimant’s own employees who carried out in-house R&D projects. This was fine in a lot of cases but many claimants soon discovered that they didn’t have as much eligible [...]
According to City AM, GSK intends to repatriate 150 R&D projects back to the UK as a result of the UK's new Patent Box regime. This is excellent news for the UK economy and goes some way to defending the honour of the Patent Box regime, unfairly labelled as a tax avoidance measure by some. However, in my [...]
A lot has been written already about the new Expenditure Credit (EC) regime for R&D claims for large companies. However, there are a couple of practical issues that I believe are worthy of discussion. These issues relate to the use of the new "expenditure credit" to discharge the company's liability to pay corporation tax. The [...]