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 [...]
I am angry! I have just taken a call from a local accountant who is worried that her client is being misled with regard to their R&D claim. On reviewing the claim, she told the client that they should remove rent, rates and interest costs as they didn't qualify. However, the client told her that [...]
The press have been reporting it and it's been doing the rounds of Twitter this week as well. "It" is the story of Florence Coke's bill for unpaid VAT. The story has, as this type of story often does, generated a certain amount of interest and frivolity. "Oh look, a bill for almost £1bn, how absurd." [...]
You can't fail to have heard about the new Patent Box regime: advisers like me have been tweeting and blogging about it, the press have been writing about it (often quite negatively), MPs on the Public Accounts Committee have been talking about it and George Osborne mentioned it again in his Budget on 20 March. [...]
There really isn’t long to go before the UK’s new Patent Box regime comes into effect. Relevant profits arising from qualifying patents on or after 1 April 2013 will be taxed at a reduced rate of 10% if you elect into the Patent Box. The most important thing to understand about the Patent Box is [...]
It is impossible now to avoid hearing on the news, or reading in the press, comments about "tax avoidance" and whatever the latest soundbite might be. Today it is the "naming and shaming" of scheme promoters who are "currently winning what appears to be a game of cat and mouse with HMRC" (according to the [...]
With alarming predictability, the usual suspects are lining up to blame the likes of Amazon and Play for the demise of HMV. It's their fault, apparently, because they are "tax avoiders" and are, therefore, able to undercut high street stores such as HMV. This mantra is then taken up by the wider public and repeated [...]