Why the Revenue had to stop a managed service company Invistigation

What do you do when your client rings you up and says that she has just received … no ordinary letter from the Revenue & Customs, but one suggesting that she might be running a managed service company? This happened to me last year, and she knew and I knew the implications at once – certain bankruptcy for her if they prevailed, and considerable damage to my reputation as I had advised her (with the help of learned counsel, be it said) how to make sure that she was on the right side of the law here. Fortunately I had also warned her at the time that, with the sector that she was in, her card was marked, and a Revenue investigation on these lines was more likely than not. Forthrightness with one’s clients generally pays off.

The managed service company (‘MSC’) rules are possibly the most deadly in the whole of the tax code. They were introduced in April 2007 as sections 61A to 61J of the Income Tax (Earnings and Pensions) Act 2003 (‘ITEPA’) and the Social Security Contributions (Managed Service Companies) Regulations 2007, to combat mass market avoidance of PAYE and NI amongst service companies. They followed on from the IR35 legislation, which had come to be widely seen as ineffective. The MSC legislation is particularly punitive as it can be used to transfer PAYE and National Insurance debts to directors and owners of companies. For the kind of company that it is aimed at, the tax liability will frequently be in the order of fifteen times its profit margin. No-one is going to be able to afford to pay that.

I was confident that we would be able to ward off this threat by conventional means – I had after all advised the client how to arrange her affairs. However nothing is certain in law, and it turned out that we had another interesting weapon in our armoury, so we decided to leave nothing to chance. A VAT inspector had come along some years back and determined that our client was supplying medical services (exempt), not medical staff (standard-rated). The difference between the two is too arcane to go into here; suffice it to say that it looked to me like an exact mirror of the test in S. 61B(1)(a) of ITEPA, which says that a company is an MSC if ‘its business consists wholly or mainly of providing … the services of an individual to other persons’. Counsel then confirmed his view that this was just so.

So – what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. We wrote to HMRC and pointed out that they had in effect already made a decision on this one, and it was negative. We did, of course, supply them with enough information for them to be able to see that the clients’ contracts had not changed since the VAT inspection, but told them that they were not getting anything more. Needless to say they issued an information and documents notice compelling us to disgorge rather more than this, so we lodged an appeal with the Tax Tribunal against the notice. Some months later HMRC told us that they were not going to contest our appeal. No reasons were given for backing down, so one can only guess at what might have caused this change of approach. However it seems likely that there were some or all of three factors at play, as follows:

 1 – The Tax Tribunal can now hear points of public law (at least sometimes).Public law concerns the behaviour of public bodies, and until recently it was thought that the Tribunal could not concern itself with these. One had to bring a judicial review (often in proceedings parallel with those that the Tribunal could hear) – a very expensive, cumbersome and uncertain process.

This all changed with Oxfam v. H.M. Revenue & Customs [2009] EWHC 3078 (Ch.) in 2009, in which Sales J. explained that there were quite a number of circumstances in which the Tribunal could hear points of public law, although in tax matters this did have to be explicitly laid down in statute. What we were complaining about was not that HMRC were necessarily wrong in their approach to MSC’s, but that they were bound by what they had decided previously in our client’s case: we had what lawyers know as a ‘legitimate expectation’. The Revenue notice had been given under paragraph 1 of Schedule 36 to the Finance Act 2008, which enables a Revenue officer to require someone to provide information or documents ‘if the information or document is reasonably required by the officer for the purpose of checking the taxpayer’s tax position’ [my italics]. Whenever one sees the word ‘reasonably’ in a statute one knows that one is in public law territory. However paragraph 29 is quite explicit: an appeal against this kind of notice is to the Tribunal.

2 – A decision made with respect to one tax can be binding on HMRC’s approach to other taxes. Legitimate expectation is a fast-changing area of public law that has developed hugely over the last twenty years, and we could find no exact precedent for this. A publicauthority is bound by a promise made or a procedure laid down (either formally or well established in practice). What we had here was neither of these: it was an unsolicited decision made as to the character of our clients’ contracts. Had the clients asked HMRC for clearance as to the VAT treatment of their supplies, the legitimate expectation would unquestionably have been confined to VAT. It was the fact that the decision was made on HMRC’s initiative that would have been crucial here in extending it to another tax.

3 – There may be public policy reasons for HMRC to refrain from challenging cases in the Tribunal. With their vast resources, £14 million at stake (or so they said), and a well-known desire to make their MSC legislation stick, why would HMRC so suddenly back off? Our case on the first point above – that the tribunal could hear this point – might look pretty robust, but on the second? This, surely, was novel territory: there were no precedents, and add to this the fact that public law remedies are always discretionary – would that not have been worth their while fighting? Well, evidently not. We do not know why, but there is a possible – indeed, quite likely – reason which has all to do with the fact that tribunal judgments are public. If they had taken this battle on and lost, they would effectively have broadcast to the whole of the UK tax profession a novel method of challenging them. Even if they had won, they might have been handed down a judgment that gave some other taxpayer with slightly different facts grounds to defeat them next time. Better from their point of view to keep people guessing. The First-tier Tax Tribunal does not set precedents, but is quite capable of delivering a robust rebuff to the authorities when its judges feel that this is warranted.

In this instance, how many other potential managed service companies had had VAT inspections that might cast doubt on what HMRC was trying to assert? Judged by the facts of the little-known case of Moher v. H.M. Revenue & Customs ([2011] UKFTT 286 (TC)) there could be quite a number. Here they stated that they had reviewed the law in the area of supplies of staff in 2007 and that their understanding of it had changed. However there was never any publication of this different view, and, extraordinarily, they went on to admit that they had continued to allow exemption to businesses whose supplies continued to meet the criteria applied before their change of interpretation. One can well understand that they would not want another case publicised that might draw attention to this.

The lessons to be learned from this are, firstly, that the Government can be held to what it has said; secondly, that points of public law are well worth trying if you have any novel or unusual points; thirdly, that challenging HMRC on public law is easier and less expensive than it was.

That is not to say that it is cheap. We used two barristers on this – one a tax specialist and the other a public law specialist. So my final tip is: get the right specialists on board. As an employment status specialist myself I would always use an employment barrister in a status case, even in the Tax Tribunal. So it is with public law questions: use a public law specialist for public law matters.

The author runs a tax consultancy specialising in PAYE, National Insurance and employment status, and he can be contacted on 0845 519 5041 or at

Tax avoidance in the public sector

The Government is finding it mighty hard to clamp down on tax avoidance, and frequently appears not to know quite what it needs to do to raise more revenue to replenish its ever-leaking coffers.

This is not surprising. One would have thought, though, that it would not be so difficult toprevent some of the more obvious tax avoidance ideas taking root in the public sector. One thing that seems particularly to have become popular there is the use of personal service companies belonging to highly paid individuals in senior positions. This matters at three levels: firstly, are the contracts with the government body made with the service company or with the individual doing the work? Secondly, should IR35 be operated, and is it being? Thirdly, are these arrangements shifting income to people (generally spouses) on lower tax rates? The sums involved can be large. One man in the news recently was Ed Lester, of the Student Loans Company, and a very revealing article in Taxation on 16th February took a good look at those aspects of his arrangements that have become public (see http://www.taxation.co.uk/taxation/Articles/2012/02/15/35851/something-fishy). The author, Richard Curtis, had clearly done some digging. He did not get as far as to find out (or to reveal) what Mr Lester is on, but it looks as though it is in the region of £200,000 a year. Someone on this pay can expect to receive £114,619 in take-home pay as an employee, whereas if he operates a company outside IR35, jointly owned with his spouse, he ought to be able to get £136,811, a considerable increase.

The Government ought to be able to raise its tax take considerably by a few simple measures that will not require any legislation. This would only apply to central Government, but that does seem to be where much of the problem lies. It simply needs to introduce a few policies, and the great thing about policies is that they can just be imposed by ministers with the minimum of fuss.

So, to take the first level: with whom is the Government making its contracts? If with the individuals, then matters are quite simple: PAYE and NIC’s must be deducted from the payments, whether they be paid to Mr Lester or to his company. It should surely be a simple matter to say that in all cases where the Government, or any of its quangos, requires the personal services of an individual then it must contract with that individual and not with any company of his. It could make the agencies that it uses agree to the same condition as well. All that that would require is a policy decision.

However it appears that this is not what is happening now, if the Taxation article is anything to go by: the contortions that some of the officials and advisers that have responsibility for Mr Lester’s pay have gone through are otherwise inexplicable. So, even if Government accepts that it can make payments through companies, is IR35 being operated? In Mr Lester’s case we have no means of knowing, but I hope that it is, as it seems to me inconceivable that for a role like this the arrangements are such that it need not be.

Whether it is or nor, this ought to be a much easier matter for HMRC to police than private sector IR35 cases. All they have to do is to ask all central government organisations to give details of all companies that they have paid for personal services rendered by individuals, and then investigate them. The Finance Act 2008 gives them the power to do this with the consent of the Tribunal, which on an issue of as much public as this I am sure would be forthcoming. It might even be legal for Government departments to respond to requests from HMRC voluntarily – if so, it ought to be Government policy that they do so.

The difference between this and a private sector engagement is two-fold: firstly, they know where to look (and the organisations are generally very big, so one request may well net a lot of fish); secondly, one would expect both the contracts and the reality to be far more obviously ones to which IR35 applied.

There nevertheless seems to be some reluctance in Government to grasp this nettle, and one has to ask why. One suspects that it is high-earning individuals wanting to be paid through companies that is driving this at the top end, although lower down it may be more the effect of recruitment freezes and driven by Government itself. Either way, the fact that the public sector does not want to address this issue suggests that many people there know that they would have to pay substantially more to some of these high earners if they are going to be able to attract their services without using companies. This in turn suggests that either avoidance or evasion of IR35 is taking place in this sector, because if the rules were being operated the individualsconcerned would not have much to gain.

Is it, then, avoidance or evasion that is taking place? This depends on the contracts, and on the basis of what is in the public domain it is not possible to tell for sure. However, avoidance is unlikely: at the top level (and certainly in Mr Lester’s case if the Taxation article is to be believed), the individuals concerned are either officers of their organisations, or would be but for the interposition of their companies. This means that their companies are subject to IR35 at least on NIC’s. A contract that suggested that this was not so would require considerable collusion on the part of the Government body concerned, and if that collusion is taking place that is a cause for concern. Eradicating this ought to be a priority for the Treasury and ought not to be difficult. It just requires taking on other arms of Government – something at which it is already adept and, indeed, notorious.

© KDGK Limited, March 2012.

Tax avoidance in the public sector

The Government is finding it mighty hard to clamp down on tax avoidance, and frequently appears not to know quite what it needs to do to raise more revenue to replenish its ever-leaking coffers.
This is not surprising. One would have thought, though, that it would not be so difficult to prevent some of the more obvious tax avoidance ideas taking root in the public sector. One thing that seems particularly to have become popular there is the use of personal service companies belonging to highly paid individuals in senior positions. This matters at three levels: firstly, are the contracts with the government body made with the service company or with the individual doing the work? Secondly, should IR35 be operated, and is it being? Thirdly, are these arrangements shifting income to people (generally spouses) on lower tax rates? The sums involved can be large. One man in the news recently was Ed Lester, of the Student Loans Company, and a very revealing article in Taxation on 16th February took a good look at those aspects of his arrangements that have become public (see http://www.taxation.co.uk/taxation/Articles/2012/02/15/35851/something– fishy). The author, Richard Curtis, had clearly done some digging. He did not get as far as to find out (or to reveal) what Mr Lester is on, but it looks as though it is in the region of £200,000 a year. Someone on this pay can expect to receive £114,619 in take-home pay as an employee,  whereas if he operates a company outside IR35, jointly owned with his spouse, he ought to be able to get £136,811, a considerable increase.
The Government ought to be able to raise its tax take considerably by a few simple measures that will not require any legislation. This would only apply to central Government, but that does seem to be where much of the problem lies. It simply needs to introduce a few policies, and the great thing about policies is that they can just be imposed by ministers with the minimum of fuss.
So, to take the first level: with whom is the Government making its contracts? If with the individuals, then matters are quite simple: PAYE and NIC’s must be deducted from the payments, whether they be paid to Mr Lester or to his company. It should surely be a simple matter to say that in all cases where the Government, or any of its quangos, requires the personal services of an individual then it must contract with that individual and not with any company of his. It could make the agencies that it uses agree to the same condition as well. All that that would require is a policy decision.
However it appears that this is not what is happening now, if the Taxation article is anything to go by: the contortions that some of the officials and advisers that have responsibility for Mr Lester’s pay have gone through are otherwise inexplicable. So, even if Government accepts that it can make payments through companies, is IR35 being operated? In Mr Lester’s case we have no means of knowing, but I hope that it is, as it seems to me inconceivable that for a role like this the arrangements are such that it need not be.
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Whether it is or nor, this ought to be a much easier matter for HMRC to police than private sector IR35 cases. All they have to do is to ask all central government organisations to give details of all companies that they have paid for personal services rendered by individuals, and then investigate them. The Finance Act 2008 gives them the power to do this with the consent of the Tribunal, which on an issue of as much public as this I am sure would be forthcoming. It might even be legal for Government departments to respond to requests from HMRC voluntarily – if so, it ought to be Government policy that they do so.
The difference between this and a private sector engagement is two-fold: firstly, they know where to look (and the organisations are generally very big, so one request may well net a lot of fish); secondly, one would expect both the contracts and the reality to be far more obviously ones to which IR35 applied. There nevertheless seems to be some reluctance in Government to grasp this nettle, and one has to ask why. One suspects that it is high-earning individuals wanting to be paid through companies that is driving this at the top end, although lower down it may be more the effect of recruitment freezes and driven by Government itself. Either way, the fact that the public sector does not want to address this issue suggests that many people there know that they would have to pay substantially more to some of these high earners if they are going to be able to attract their services without using companies. This in turn suggests that either avoidance or evasion of IR35 is taking place in this sector, because if the rules were being operated the individuals concerned would not have much to gain.
Is it, then, avoidance or evasion that is taking place? This depends on the contracts, and on the basis of what is in the public domain it is not possible to tell for sure. However, avoidance is unlikely: at the top level (and certainly in Mr Lester’s case if the Taxation article is to be believed), the individuals concerned are either officers of their organisations, or would be but for the interposition of their companies. This means that their companies are subject to IR35 at least on NIC’s. A contract that suggested that this was not so would require considerable collusion on the part of the Government body concerned, and if that collusion is taking place that is a cause for concern. Eradicating this ought to be a priority for the Treasury and ought not to be difficult. It just requires taking on other arms of Government – something at which it is already adept and, indeed, notorious.

Be careful what you wish for

Do we want a general anti-avoidance rule? DAVID KIRK thinks not
KEY POINTS
 A suitable quid pro quo for the GAAR?  Importance of a clearance system.  What is reasonable tax planning?  Effect of a GAAR on income shifting – Arctic Systems.  Corresponding non-abusive arrangements.
We are all in favour of a general anti-avoidance rule (GAAR), are we not? At least we are in public: it is very difficult at a time of financial stringency to be defending tax avoidance.
Any criticism of steps taken to counter it, particularly from tax consultants, can easily be seen as special pleading.
It is against this background that comment on the report by Graham Aaronson QC [1] has been somewhat muted, and there is a danger that the GAAR could slip in without proper scrutiny.
This would be a pity, as proper scrutiny has too often been lacking when it comes to tax legislation.
Mr Aaronson’s proposal has much to commend it. The main feature is that it is only intended to apply to the most ‘egregious’ tax schemes. He calls it a ‘general anti-abuse rule’, which conveniently abbreviates to the same ‘GAAR’.
Its essence is that it asks taxpayers to treat HMRC fairly, by playing the law with a straight bat and not relying on loopholes. Taxpayers should be asking for a quid pro quo here, which is that HMRC treat us fairly too.
One-sided
A first and fundamental objection to the proposed GAAR is that it does not give us anything meaningful in return.
For example, it seems to be generally agreed that an anti-avoidance rule cannot operate fairly without a clearance system. This is something to which HMRC seem to object as they would have to find the resources to staff it.
The report suggests that because it is only targeting ‘egregious’ abuse, a clearance system is unnecessary.
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This is surely unacceptable: there is no essential difference between an anti-abuse rule and an anti-avoidance rule. The one is merely a narrowly drawn form of the other.
Neither are we promised simpler legislation. Mr Aaronson speculates: ‘In time, once confidence is established in the effectiveness of the anti-abuse rule, it should be possible to initiate a programme to reduce and simplify the existing body of detailed anti-avoidance rules’.
Is he serious? He recognises a ‘particular concern’ that ‘the prospect of reducing the volume and complexity of specific anti-avoidance rules, which an anti-abuse rule would facilitate, will not be fulfilled’.
His solution: ‘Provision for a regular, say five yearly, review of progress would instil confidence that the benefits which the GAAR should bring will be delivered’.
A five-yearly review? Government moves slowly at the best of times: a five-yearly review will not impress anyone.
The clearance system and simplification go hand in hand. Having a clearance system is the only way of putting sufficient pressure on HMRC to make them want to simplify the law.
It is an essential quid pro quo for that reason too. Once the law is simplified, there will be much less need for clearance.
So if this GAAR is introduced, our representative bodies must make it absolutely clear that they will be putting relentless pressure on the government to do away with unnecessary legislation. They should have a wish-list for every budget, and be very vocal when the expected simplification does not happen.
They might perhaps start with ITEPA 2003, part 7A [2] on disguised remuneration: this extends to nearly 28,000 words  – every one of which ought to be rendered unnecessary by the GAAR. (The GAAR itself is only 1,500 words long, and commendably comprehensible by comparison.)
Purpose of tax
What of the proposal itself? Much of it will undoubtedly achieve the aim of counteracting ‘egregious’ avoidance schemes without creating the kind of uncertainty that will drive business away from our country.
Unfortunately it will not eradicate all such schemes, and in particular one rather vague provision reflects the unsatisfactory philosophical basis on which the measure is proposed. That basis is laid out in paragraph 3.3 of the report, where Mr Aaronson says:
‘My approach to taxation… is based on the premise that the levying of tax is the principal means by which the state pays for the services and facilities which it provides for its citizens.’
He contrasts this with ‘earlier days, when it was common to regard tax as a form of confiscation by the state’.
This is lazy thinking. The fact is that both these viewpoints are statements of the obvious. To those who think that, because of its confiscatory nature, the levying of tax had to be justified by the letter of the law, and the statutes that did this therefore needed to be interpreted strictly, it is patently unsatisfactory to say that this has not worked so we need a GAAR.
It is surely simpler, and more justifiable, to say that there is no reason why the ‘letter of the law’ should not incorporate a GAAR.
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Furthermore, it is precisely because of its confiscatory nature that tax cannot be viewed as another way of paying for services. Some of the services that the state provides are themselves controversial, and much of the manner of their provision is appallingly inefficient.
The state cannot give what it has not first taken away, and a mentality that acknowledges where the money comes from and how it could be used if it was not confiscated is one of the necessary checks on over-powerful government in a modern society.
It is from this weak philosophical underpinning that one can see that the proposals do not always make clear what they are trying to prevent.
In many ways they are clear: there are some fearsome-looking safeguards intended to make sure that HMRC do not use the GAAR as a blunt weapon to blast away at anything that they do not like.
The list of ‘abnormal features’ that are likely to be caught by the rule looks eminently sensible. So does the fact that the burden of proof for most items in this rule lies with HMRC.
What is reasonable?
Trouble comes with one of the GAAR’s key features, which is that an arrangement is not counteracted if it constitutes ‘reasonable tax planning’.
The report defines reasonable tax planning as follows.
‘An arrangement does not achieve an abusive tax result if it can reasonably be regarded as a reasonable exercise of choices of conduct afforded by the provisions of the Acts’.
There is some rather odd use of the English language here: using ‘reasonable’ twice. Mr Aaronson is at pains to say that the GAAR is designed to let someone off the hook when, even though the judge does not regard what he does as a reasonable use of tax planning, others might.
The concept of reasonable behaviour in English law generally crops up when one is looking at a public official carrying out his duties, or in negligence cases, where more objective criteria can be applied.
This is because the failure to act reasonably can have bad consequences for innocent parties, which are easy to foresee and for which there is a direct link.
These are well understood, but there are a couple of key differences between these doctrines and Mr Aaronson’s proposals.
The first is that the consequences of unreasonable behaviour in the world of tax are indirect and difficult to establish: the only direct and foreseeable consequence of avoidance is that a very large government department has less money than it otherwise might.
One cannot go on from this to conclude that because Mr Jones did not pay his tax, Mr Smith did not get a rise in his pension.
The other difference is that, in tort and public law, we are concerned with what the reasonable person does, whereas Mr Aaronson is asking us also to concern ourselves with what the reasonable person thinks.
Inside whose mind is the judge supposed to get, to decide what is reasonable? The number of reasonable views on what is reasonable tax planning must be almost unlimited, and in any event, most reasonable people keep their thoughts to themselves much of the time.
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Does the fact that a large number of businesses in the UK follow a particular model constitute evidence that it can be viewed as reasonable?
If so, is there not an incentive to mass-market ideas for avoidance? And in what numbers does tax planning have to be carried out before it will be accepted as reasonable?
This does not seem like an entirely right and proper way of looking at the concept, but how else does one judge what is a reasonable exercise of choices of conduct, without being totally subjective?
I wrote above that some of the services that the government provides were controversial: indeed, a few people regard some of them as both immoral and offensive in themselves or carried out in an immoral and offensive way.
These may be minority views, but they are not unreasonable, and it is a perfectly reasonable conclusion to draw that those holding them are entitled to use whatever legal (and I stress the word ‘legal’) means they can devise to avoid paying for these services, or paying taxes to this alien state.
A probably more widely held view is that, far from being fair that the government needs to seize more than one-third of everything that the country earns to function (on one measure it is 39%), confiscation on this scale is frankly monstrous, however the money is spent. Is such a view really unreasonable?
Who decides?
Judges who think that it is will come up against precedents. An example quoted by Mr Aaronson is Lord Loreburn, who said:
‘It is trite law that nothing less than clear, express and unambiguous language is effective to levy a tax’.
Lord Loreburn was a Liberal politician and Lord Chancellor when he gave this judgment in 1910, a year in which the government was only attempting to seize 15% of GDP, rather than 39%, to carry out its functions.
Can one really say this is unreasonable when it comes from the lips of so eminent a judge? If it was reasonable then, by what argument is it not reasonable now?
And if it is reasonable now, why is tax avoidance unreasonable? It is, after all, a process of reasoning that leads to this conclusion.
Some judges will doubtless be able to exercise their judgment on this in a genuinely impartial way. There are bound to be others who cannot.
What is a judge, faced with an application to use the GAAR, to make of all this? If this argument is correct, the GAAR is neutered at birth.
If not, the judges are forced to use their private judgment on a matter of ethics to decide whether or not something is unreasonable. I cannot believe that they will want to do this, so this section of the GAAR needs rethinking from scratch.
In practice
Let us now see how the GAAR might work in practice. Readers may recall a consultation that came out in 2007 with proposals to combat income shifting.
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At its crudest, this is when someone does all the work in a business but arranges things so that their spouse gets a good slice of the income, so as to reduce the overall tax bill.
The proposals were badly thought out and did not go any further: many spouses do not do business as individuals but as a family unit, and establishing the quantum of what belongs to whom would be almost impossible.
But if there is one thing that would be messier than Parliament trying to counter income shifting by statute, it would be the courts trying to do so by precedent.
That is because, while a statute would consider all the circumstances that it wishes to address, a court only addresses the circumstances of the case in hand, and if the judges do not think the consequences through properly they will give a judgment that is a model of lucidity for that case, but makes the position no clearer for those whose facts are not the same.
Consider what might happen in the case of an IT consultant. We might, for the sake of argument, call him ‘Geoffrey Jones’.
His wife helps him in a few administrative tasks in the business, and the business is conducted through a company, which we’ll call ‘Arctic Systems Ltd’.
The company pays Mr Jones a very small salary, with the result that, although he is responsible for bringing in most (if not all) of its income, the company has large profits which it can pay out as dividends in equal shares to both of them, thus doubling up Mrs Jones’s basic rate band and saving the couple (or you might say saving him) a lot of tax.
Along comes Mr Garnett, a tax inspector, who challenges this and says that all the income belongs to Mr Jones, and should be taxed as such.
As readers will know, it was HMRC’s loss in Garnett v Jones (re Arctic Systems) [2007] STC 1536 [3] that led them to try to instate the anti-income shifting legislation referred to above.
The consequences of that legislation, had they succeeded, would have been very messy, and still would not have raised significant sums of money.
Impact of a GAAR
How would the Joneses have fared had there been a GAAR at the time of their appeal, so that HMRC would have been able to say to the court that he had achieved an abusive tax result, which ought to be struck down?
This was clearly the Revenue’s view of what he had done. An ‘abusive tax result’ is defined in Mr Aaronson’s report as an ‘advantageous tax result’ that is neither ‘reasonable tax planning’ nor an ‘arrangement without tax intent’. It also has to incorporate ‘abnormal arrangements’.
Mr Jones has certainly achieved an ‘advantageous tax result’, and the judgments show that he had a ‘tax intent’. Is this ‘reasonable tax planning’?
There are certainly many people who would regard it as such, but are they reasonable in holding that view, or can they be excluded because they have an interest in the matter?
It would be a brave judge who took on the wrath of the independent contractors’ lobby because he thought that none of them was being reasonable, but Mr Aaronson’s proposal would have required him to consider that possibility.
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How does one appeal such a decision? Unless the judge has taken evidence as to what reasonable people think, which is unlikely, then in deciding whether it is a view that can reasonably be held, he is merely expressing his opinion on a matter of ethics.
A Court of Appeal judge might have a different opinion, so there would be every incentive to appeal.
Finally, are there abnormal arrangements? They may not look abnormal – indeed, because they are so widely used, they look normal.
However, that ignores the definition in the rule. One could argue that this arrangement fulfils three of the seven criteria for abnormal arrangements described in clause 7(3) of the proposed rule:
 it ‘results in receipts being taken into account for tax purposes which are significantly less than the true economic income, profit or gain’ (item (a): in his case, viewed in isolation from his wife’s);  it ‘includes a transaction at significantly less than market value, or otherwise on non- commercial terms’ (item (c), referring to his salary); and  it ‘includes a person … which would not be included if the arrangement were not designed to achieve an abusive tax result’ (item (e), referring to his wife).
So Mr Jones would be completely dependent on the definition of ‘reasonable tax planning’. Bearing in mind that two of the judges that heard the Jones v Garnett case found against the taxpayer under existing legislation, one need not be too hopeful.
It is also worth a look at the consequences of the Joneses’ arrangements being struck down under the GAAR: they have to be replaced by a ‘corresponding non-abusive arrangement’.
Does this mean a company with Mr Jones as the sole shareholder? Or should he be a sole trader? Or should he raise his salary to reflect his earning power in the open market?
The GAAR is silent on what to do if there is more than one ‘corresponding non-abusive arrangement’, and bearing in mind the general tenor of the proposals and all the other safeguards, the choice of alternatives ought to be at the taxpayer’s discretion.
This is but one example of how a GAAR could affect tax planning. There are more that other specialists are better qualified to draw to the profession’s and the government’s attention.
A long period of consultation is needed, with plenty of time for specialists in all fields of tax to give the Aaronson report proper scrutiny and see how other transactions stand up to it.
That means you, dear reader, so I look forward to seeing other areas put under the microscope in the tax media. Only in this way will a proper debate get underway that will allow us to conclude whether this general anti-abuse rule is really a good idea after all.
Categories:  Income Tax [4] Tax Topic Tags:  Comment & Analysis [5] Tags:  GAAR [6] Arctic [7]
Source URL: http://www.taxation.co.uk/taxation/Articles/2012/01/25/34791/careful-what-you-wish
Links: [1] http://www.taxation.co.uk/taxation/Articles/2011/11/23/32161/general-anti-avoidance-rule-steps-forward
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[2] http://www.lexisnexis.com/uk/legal/api/version1/sr?csi=274768,282817,292143,292140,274674&sr=NO RMCITE%282003_1a%29%20AND%20PART-NUM%287%29&shr=t [3] http://www.lexisnexis.com/uk/legal/api/version1/sr?csi=274713&sr=REPORT– CITATION%282007%20pre/1%20STC%20pre/1%201536%29&shr=t [4] http://www.taxation.co.uk/taxation/category/income-tax [5] http://www.taxation.co.uk/taxation/category/content-type/comment-analysis [6] http://www.taxation.co.uk/taxation/category/tags/gaar-0 [7] http://www.taxation.co.uk/taxation/category/tags/arctic-0

IR35

Congratulations to the Professional Contractors Group, who have wheedled out of the Government some interesting statistics on just how ineffective the IR35 legislation is.  In the 2010/11 tax year HMRC opened only 23 investigations into whether IR35 should be operated.  This was up on 2009/10 (12 investigations) but a considerable reduction on 2007/08 (104) and earlier years.  The tax yield from this has gone down too, from £1.9 million in 2006/07 to £219,000 last year.  You can see the details at
http://www.pcg.org.uk/cms/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=8118:pcg-calls-for-action-in-light-of-ir35-tax-yield-figures-&catid=861:press-release-archive&Itemid=1361.

When put against the Government’s total tax take and the number of freelance contractors operating through companies, these figures are insignificant.  It makes one wonder what the ‘deterrent effect’ is that the Government says it sees in keeping the legislation on the
books.

It also makes one wonder what is the point of the service company question, which appears on form P35 (the year end PAYE reporting form), and in the employment pages of individuals’ tax returns.  This was inserted into the tax return in 2008 when HMRC was under pressure from Parliament to ‘do something’ about the low yield from IR35 investigations, and it asks what salary and dividends the taxpayer has received from any service companies (not necessarily ones that ought to be operating IR35).

Rest easy – HMRC is clearly not making much use of this information.  It is quite probable that the question is ultra vires anyway.  Keith Gordon, a barrister at Atlas Chambers, reports in his blog(http://www.atlaschambers.com/members/KMG5.php) on a lengthy correspondence that he had with the Revenue on this one, in which he seems to have very effectively tied them up in knots.  This is definitely recommended reading if you want justification for opting out of answering the service company question.

So David Kirk & Co. Ltd’s policy is that we recommend to our clients that they do not answer the service company question, but do explain why they are not answering it, and we prepare tax returns on that basis unless you ask us not to.