Business Matters

Latest: HMRC targets Home Improvements traders

HMRC has announced the focus of its campaigns to be implemented later this year.

The latest targets for HMRC activity are:

• Home improvement trades. This will build on campaigns aimed at plumbers and electricians. Hundreds of thousands of tradespeople in construction and building work such as roofing, window fitting, bricklaying, carpentry and joinery will be affected.
• Missing returns. This campaign will initially focus on those who fail to complete tax returns and who are liable to pay tax at the highest rates. Overall this will contribute to the wider HMRC activity tackling failure to complete tax returns.
• Direct selling. This will target customers who ought to be paying tax on income they earn from buying and selling goods directly to others, or from the commission on these sales.

Following the success of previous campaigns which utilised HMRC’s ‘Connect’ system to analyse and identify potential links and targets, HMRC has advised that it will use new technology to trawl the internet for information about specific, targeted people and businesses. This will also include cross-referencing returns received with other information held to ‘build a picture’ of where they can identify taxpayers with missing returns.

As seen in the Plumbers Tax Safe Plan, HMRC will target those that do not come forward with the full force of its powers including higher penalties and criminal prosecution. The Plumbers Tax Safe Plan has so far raised nearly £4million and seen 10 plumbers arrested with HMRC planning more arrests in the future.

mad!

Just about everyone who knows me would say that I'm a bit unusual. My friends and family would go one stage further I think!

But I need to start at the beginning...

Faced with the usual dilemma of where to go for Christmas lunch, I asked the team. We had had a tremendous offer of joining one of our clients for a Mediaeval Banquet because they were doing something different this year - you could dress up in mediaeval style clothes or go "as you are" - seemed like a great opportunity for some bonding (not bondage) and have excellent fun at the same time. The other alternatives were to join another of our clients in Invernesshire for some time in the great outdoors or to go traditional and have the usual "turkey" lunch at a ridiculously overpriced venue. Or anything else they could think of. The outdoors option was most popular and that's what we did. There was no snow then.

We decided to turn it into a Christmas adventure day and then discovered that winter is not REALLY a time for outdoor adventures unless it's Nordic Skiing (which is not really that adventurous - just hard work). However with some perseverance we found a provider - Full on Adventure