dh is evading tax by buying firewood cash in hand

[saladdodger2015]

We've switched firewood suppliers and the new one is half the cost. Its very much a guy doing it for beer money, no website, no invoice, no company just cash in hand.

Aibu to be concerned about this?

Jesus he'd have to be a pretty poor money launderer to be doing by selling a bit of firewood.

I would never pay someone who offered me a lower price for cash as that would be a clear indication that they intended not to declare it. I know it's their fraud not mine but I will not condone theft.

Having said that cheques are rare these days and if I am quoted a price for the product or the job that is not dependant on paying in cash I don't mind.
I pay my log man by cheque or cash he doesn't mind. (£80 for a lorry load by the way, how much is yours?)

Oh and car washes often being used for money laundering That was in Breaking Bad .

It was in breaking bad PeaStalks, but it's also true. There have been links to organised crime and most distressingly, people trafficking/slave labour.

Car washes are often used to launder money - and taxi cabs, hairdressers and tanning salons.

PeaStalks

the cash/cheque situation can be business dependent. Working in the motor trade you learn very quickly that a bounced cheque is lost money, unless you kept the car (which we did, despite some "interesting" characters calling the police .)

However, as I paid our roofer with a cheque last year, commenting he was trusting, he just said:

"Not at all. I know where you live."

Fair point, I think.

Assuming he doesn't have a portable card reader, maybe he just can't afford for a cheque (or several) to bounce, or a client forgetting to make a transfer

^

This. Cheques are a pain and you don't know if they are even good until about 5 days after you try to pay them in. E-transfer requires you to give out your own bank account details, which you might not want to do, and it can be hard to match up payments to deliveries.

A businessman is entitled to select how he wants to be paid. It's then his responsibility to pay his own tax. Unless you have clear information that says he isn't paying tax (in which case you can tell HMRC), which his desire to be paid in cash is not, then leave him to get on with his business.

And there are plenty of legitimate reasons why a small tradesperson would want to be paid in cash, not least cash flow.

Anyway, the important question is how much a tonne and where does he deliver to? Need wood.

Businesses like tanning saloons and car washes are popular with money launderers as there's no tangible goods going in and out the shop as well as being services largely paid for in cash.

So it is easy to stick down 100 cars as bring washed when only 80 were actually washed and then shoving the dodgy money through the books and making it look like legitimate income. Firewood which the seller has to buy stock and sell on isn't a great cover, so I doubt this guy is some money laundering kingpin.

Family, it doesn't say that he is refusing to invoice/give receipts, just that he hasn't offered one.

its been a while since the post but since 2008

Woodlands and Taxation
Woodland ownership can have some useful tax advantages.The taxation of forestry /woodland has always been fairly generous to encourage people to purchase woodland and to spend money on management. The main tax advantages of owning woodland or forestry land are:

income from timber sales is tax free whether the woodland is held personally or in a company name;
if the woodland can be shown to have been commercially managed, it will be free of inheritance tax ("IHT" for short) once you have owned it for more than two years.If you want to hand on a woodland to children without inheritance tax/IHT being payable this provision saves the need to make a lifetime gift of your woodland;
woodland gives the possibility of using the roll-over provision of the tax system.This means that if you have sold a business and made a capital gain and you use the money to buy a woodland, you defer (indefinitely) the Capital Gains Tax you would have paid on the sale of the business (or business asset);
in any event the tax rate for capital gains has gone down since Spring 2008 to a single rate of 18% and you can use your Annual Exemption to give you £9,200 of non-taxable gain in any one year.If the woodland is owned in two names you will, of course, get two sets of allowance;
if you do end up paying CGT (capital gains tax) it is at least reduced because when you sell a woodland you only pay tax on the gain in the value of the land and not on the increase in value of the timber;
there are generally no property taxes (business rates etc) on woodland;
Woodland Grant Scheme income is not taxed as it is spent directly on woodland management.

good investmant if you can afford