The £53K Belly Dance

The Telegraph recently reported an interesting tax tribunal case, involving the interpretation of belly dancing as to whether it is a sport or not.

Audrey Cheruvier, director of the Fleur Estelle Belly Dance School, argued that her courses were educational because belly dancing was taught as a sport.

Had her argument been upheld, she would not be liable for VAT .

However, the tribunal ruled that it was recreational rather than educational; and as such she was liable for £53K in tax dating back to June 2009.

Tax does have to be taxing.

Professional Cover Against the Threat of Costly TAX and VAT Investigations

Insurance to protect you against the cost of enquiry or dispute with HMRC is available from several sources including Solar Tax Investigation Insurance.

Ken Frost has negotiated a 10% discount on any polices that may suit your needs.

However, neither Ken Frost nor HMRCISSHITE either endorses or recommends their services.

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Solar Tax Investigation Insurance is a tax-fee protection service that will pay up to £75,000 towards your accountant's fees in the event of an HM Revenue & Customs full enquiry or dispute.

To find out more, please use this link Solar Tax Investigation Insurance



HMRC Is Shite (www.hmrcisshite.com), also available via the domain www.hmrconline.com, is brought to you by www.kenfrost.com "The Living Brand"

Online Filing Deadline Looming

Those of you who have yet to file your self assessment tax returns for 2013 have until the end of January to do so online, lest you be fined for tardiness.

The fine is an automatic £100, irrespective of whether you owe any tax or not!

Human nature being what it is, it seems that many people leave this task to the very last minute. HMRC have in fact identified that it is Londoners who are the most prone to leave this to the last minute.

Seemingly 11% of the 560,000 people in Inner London, who should have filed a return last year, missed the deadline. Other regions were, seemingly, less tardy.

Here is the text of the HMRC press release:

"Londoners are more likely to miss the tax return deadline than taxpayers in any other part of the UK, figures released today by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) reveal.

Around one in nine (11 per cent) of the 560,000 people in Inner London who had to send in a tax return last year didn’t do so by the relevant deadline – 31 October for paper returns and 31 January for online submissions.

The one million taxpayers in Outer London were more punctual, with one in 11 (9 per cent) failing to meet the deadline, but they were still the second worst offenders. The tardiest taxpayers outside of London were in the North West of England, with 8 per cent of their 890,000 returns failing to meet the deadline.

Taxpayers in the rest of the English regions fared better. The most punctual were in the South West, with only 6 per cent of their one million tax returns arriving late. The other English regions, as well as Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, all registered 7 per cent of late tax returns, which was the UK national average.

HMRC Director General of Personal Tax, Ruth Owen, said:
“Whether you’re from London, Livingston, Lisburn or Llandudno, the consequences of missing the tax return deadline are the same – an automatic £100 late-filing penalty.

“The longer you delay, the more you have to pay. So if you still have to send us your tax return, take action now.”

Anyone with an outstanding 2012-13 tax return must send it online, and pay any tax they owe, by 31 January.

Visit HMRC’s website at http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/ to register for Self Assessment and file your online tax return for free. Using a search engine to find HMRC’s online filing service can produce results which include third party websites that charge to file on your behalf. Therefore, if you want to file for free, type the HMRC website address directly into your internet browser’s web address bar.

For general help and advice on completing a return, visit www.hmrc.gov.uk/sa or call the Self Assessment helpline on 0300 200 3310 (open 8.00am to 8.00pm, Monday to Friday, and from 8.00am to 4.00pm on Saturdays).

Notes for editors
1.  Around 10.9 million people are expected send a tax return for the 2012-13 tax year.
2.  The UK Self Assessment filing populations on which the figures are based are as follows: Inner London – 560,000; Outer London – 990,000; North West – 890,000; East Midlands – 640,000; West Midlands – 750,000; East of England – 1,040,000; South East – 1,710,000; South West – 1,000,000; Yorkshire & The Humber – 680,000; North East – 270,000; Northern Ireland – 240,000; Scotland – 660,000; and Wales – 400,000.
3.  The penalties for late Self Assessment returns are:

• an initial £100 fixed penalty, which applies even if there is no tax to pay, or if the tax due is paid on time;

• after 3 months, additional daily penalties of £10 per day, up to a maximum of £900;
• after 6 months, a further penalty of 5 per cent of the tax due or £300, whichever is greater; and
• after 12 months, another 5 per cent or £300 charge, whichever is greater.

4.  There are also additional penalties for paying late of 5 per cent of the tax unpaid at: 30 days; 6 months; and 12 months."

Tax does have to be taxing.

Professional Cover Against the Threat of Costly TAX and VAT Investigations

Insurance to protect you against the cost of enquiry or dispute with HMRC is available from several sources including Solar Tax Investigation Insurance.

Ken Frost has negotiated a 10% discount on any polices that may suit your needs.

However, neither Ken Frost nor HMRCISSHITE either endorses or recommends their services.

What is Solar Tax Investigation Insurance?

Solar Tax Investigation Insurance is a tax-fee protection service that will pay up to £75,000 towards your accountant's fees in the event of an HM Revenue & Customs full enquiry or dispute.

To find out more, please use this link Solar Tax Investigation Insurance



HMRC Is Shite (www.hmrcisshite.com), also available via the domain www.hmrconline.com, is brought to you by www.kenfrost.com "The Living Brand"

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Insurance to protect you against the cost of enquiry or dispute with HMRC is available from several sources including Solar Tax Investigation Insurance.

Ken Frost has negotiated a 10% discount on any polices that may suit your needs.

However, neither Ken Frost nor HMRCISSHITE either endorses or recommends their services.

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HMRC Is Shite (www.hmrcisshite.com), also available via the domain www.hmrconline.com, is brought to you by www.kenfrost.com "The Living Brand"

Oops!

All human beings make mistakes, therefore kudos to HMRC for proving that it too is all too human wrt a £577K tax bill sent in error to a pensioner.

The Telegraph reports that retired councillor Don Yates, 72, who lives on an £11,000 a year pension, has been mistakenly sent a tax bill demanding a payment of £576,850.85.

The letter from HMRC was sent last month on December 20, which told Mr Yates to settle up his tax bill as soon as possible.

Mr Yates said that he received a similar letter from the tax office in November, but at the time he misread the bill. Mr Yates at first thought the bill was for £384, when in actual fact HMRC said he owed £384,567.25.

The pensioner thought nothing more of the letter and cast it aside, believing HMRC officials had made an innocent mistake.

But having receiving a second tax bill a month later Mr Yates has now contacted HMRC to rectify the mistakes.

The human element, for the computer systems only react/process to what is input, in companies and government organisations can never be entirely "automated away".

Tax does have to be taxing.

Professional Cover Against the Threat of Costly TAX and VAT Investigations

Insurance to protect you against the cost of enquiry or dispute with HMRC is available from several sources including Solar Tax Investigation Insurance.

Ken Frost has negotiated a 10% discount on any polices that may suit your needs.

However, neither Ken Frost nor HMRCISSHITE either endorses or recommends their services.

What is Solar Tax Investigation Insurance?

Solar Tax Investigation Insurance is a tax-fee protection service that will pay up to £75,000 towards your accountant's fees in the event of an HM Revenue & Customs full enquiry or dispute.

To find out more, please use this link Solar Tax Investigation Insurance



HMRC Is Shite (www.hmrcisshite.com), also available via the domain www.hmrconline.com, is brought to you by www.kenfrost.com "The Living Brand"

Fake HMRC Sites

A timely warning in the Guardian, alerting those who file tax returns online not to be duped into paying fees to websites that claim to check and file your return with HMRC.

As per the Guardian:

"Mike Walker lost £400 after googling "hmrc" to file his tax return. He was directed to taxreturngateway.com, and realised too late that it was not the official government site. "It looked very similar, but it was only once I'd gone through the process of filing my return and made a payment of £400 that I realised it wasn't the same," he says.

Walker adds: "I thought the official site had changed from previous years to make it cleaner and simpler to use."

When filing your return online only use the offcial HMRC site.



Tax does have to be taxing.

Professional Cover Against the Threat of Costly TAX and VAT Investigations

Insurance to protect you against the cost of enquiry or dispute with HMRC is available from several sources including Solar Tax Investigation Insurance.

Ken Frost has negotiated a 10% discount on any polices that may suit your needs.

However, neither Ken Frost nor HMRCISSHITE either endorses or recommends their services.

What is Solar Tax Investigation Insurance?

Solar Tax Investigation Insurance is a tax-fee protection service that will pay up to £75,000 towards your accountant's fees in the event of an HM Revenue & Customs full enquiry or dispute.

To find out more, please use this link Solar Tax Investigation Insurance



HMRC Is Shite (www.hmrcisshite.com), also available via the domain www.hmrconline.com, is brought to you by www.kenfrost.com "The Living Brand"

Open Letter To Lin Homer

Here is the text of an open letter to Lin Homer, written and published by Stuart Jones, regarding RTI and how it affects small businesses:

"An open letter to Lin Homer, the chief executive of HMRC, on behalf of small businesses and their advisors

Your recent press release (RTI package of help for micro businesses) which proudly tells us that

almost 93% of employers …..are now using the new process[RTI] to send PAYE information about their employee in real time, and the majority are finding the new system easy to use

glosses over the issues facing small businesses and their advisors.

Yesterday morning your Colchester Debt Management Unit contacted one of my clients to ask them to pay the £609.20 still owing in respect of their Month 6 PAYE.

When we spoke to the office, on behalf of our client, we were told that they had only paid £7,311.78 but the Full Payment Submission ( FPS) showed a liability of £7,920.98. On checking our records we discovered that the FPS we had submitted showed a liability of £7,311.78. No tax was due. When we explained this to the office we were told that it was must be a fault in our software, rather than HMRC’s, and we should contact our software provider.

When we did, moneysoft, our software provider, was surprised that HMRC should suggest that it was their software at fault as there was evidence that this was a common problem affecting many different software providers. Your Colchester office had, in fact, told us the same but were still not prepared to accept that the HMRC software was at fault.

Moneysoft showed us how to extract the information supplied to HMRC in XML format which we checked and found in agreement with the paper report we had discussed with HMRC.

Having proved our figures we contacted your Colchester office who were unable to explain why the figures differed. We were told to write to your Customer Operations Employer Office, enclosing a paper copy of the XML submission report, asking for the difference to be investigated.

All in all, we spent an hour and a half investigating an error caused by a fault in your computer system. Our client will not pay us for this work. HMRC will not reimburse us. Why should small businesses and their advisors be penalised for faults in a system which has been forced on us?

Your press release mentions giving micro businesses up to two years to adapt. Leaving aside the problem of adapting to a system which doesn’t work, why should businesses yet again have to change their ways, at considerable cost, to fit in with HMRC?

Paul Aplin, in this year’s Hardman Lecture  (I understand you were a guest) asked why the one-in-two-out rule for business red tape does not apply to HMRC?

Small and micro businesses cannot be expected to be the government’s unpaid tax collectors and administrators. The time has come to call a halt to the red tape.

The tax tail has to stop wagging the business dog."

Comments and views welcome.


Tax does have to be taxing.

Professional Cover Against the Threat of Costly TAX and VAT Investigations

Insurance to protect you against the cost of enquiry or dispute with HMRC is available from several sources including Solar Tax Investigation Insurance.

Ken Frost has negotiated a 10% discount on any polices that may suit your needs.

However, neither Ken Frost nor HMRCISSHITE either endorses or recommends their services.

What is Solar Tax Investigation Insurance?

Solar Tax Investigation Insurance is a tax-fee protection service that will pay up to £75,000 towards your accountant's fees in the event of an HM Revenue & Customs full enquiry or dispute.

To find out more, please use this link Solar Tax Investigation Insurance



HMRC Is Shite (www.hmrcisshite.com), also available via the domain www.hmrconline.com, is brought to you by www.kenfrost.com "The Living Brand"