Introduction for Newsletter 29.07.09

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This year’s Finance Bill has received Royal Assent and we intend to include next week a full review and update of its provisions. However, two sets of Regulations, which were waiting for the Bill to become law, have been introduced immediately and are reviewed this week.

The first covers the promised changes to the calculation rules for interest charged by HMRC on underpaid and overpaid tax. A surprise addition to the changes is an increase in the minimum interest rate for overpaid tax, from 0% to 0.5%. This means that HMRC will always pay some interest on overpaid tax, even if the formula does not require it.

The second change is the inclusion in the list of avoidance schemes requiring disclosure of pension scheme arrangements that endeavour to get around the reduction in tax relief on pension scheme contributions that will take effect from 2011.

The major news item this week is HMRC’s latest proposals to tackle the problem of “false self-employment” in the construction industry. They involve the application of a new set of criteria which, if not met, would require payments to be paid under PAYE and NICs rules. The consultation runs until October and there is no proposed implementation date yet.

And this week’s Employer FAQ is a reminder of the “Alabaster” SMP recalculation rules.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 05:10 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.