Changes to contracting and tax - Act now!

[RedZeppelin]

In case you haven't heard, the Chancellor is intending to propose some serious and worrying changes re. contracting and tax in the forthcoming autumn statement: recent article in the Guardian

If, like me, you are likely to be affected by these changes please lobby your MP. This article contains a link to a template letter which you can personalise as well as a link to find your MP's email address.

Bump - I was going to share this. I think the Gov has the self-employed in its sights....

I suspect that the focus of the autumn statement will be more on teh omnishambles of benefit cuts

the dividend rules in April are going to change the tax breaks massively anyway

The dividend rules, the changes to claiming travel & subsistence and the end of the NI small employers allowance all add up to a big ouch for contractors/freelancers, but potentially liveable with with if you are able to increase your rates to cover for this. But what the Guardian is hinting at is potentially game over for thousands of contractors/freelancers and probably great news for the big consultancies who can bring in cheap labour from abroad.

A great shame that successive government havn't been able to tackle the true abuse cases, i.e. the call centres where entire floors full of people are "limited companies" - literally "bums on seats" to do the work rather than anything remotely like a business or self-employed. That's what IR35 was designed to target but HMRC has failed miserably to properly target the abuse.

It should always have been targetted at the abusive employers, i.e. send compliance officers into the telecom, bank and utility firms as the first phase and look at working practices/contracts etc of entire departments. Look at it once and then apply the "IR35 caught" status to everyone working under that contract - dozens or hundreds of people caught very efficiently. HMRC have wasted untold amounts of time and money going after the end contractors in a random approach, i.e. going after lone contractors using some kind of shooting fish in a barrel approach.

Now it seems inevitable that lots of genuine small businesses and self employed will get caught up in whatever new anti-avoidance rules they dream up.

Accountants said IR35 wouldn't work 15 years ago and said then that it should be the employer not the contractor who was targetted, but as usual, they were ignored!