Tax Payer – if you set up as a business one should pay the correct business taxes. ‘Disguised employment’ should be tackled, yes. However, a broad blanket, stiffling all small business does not lead to ‘everyone paying their fair share of taxes’. It has just lead to another merry-go-round of unregulated intermediaries between the client and the tradesman. It certainly doesn’t lead to everyone enjoying their ‘fair share of employment benefits’!

Increasingly, there are questions being asked about why should one tackle ‘disguised employment’. If one wants to operate as a company, why shouldn’t one? This issue isn’t about principle – it’s about lost National Insurance payments…….slowly….very slowly no doubt, these are disappearing and the amount of tax deducted from wages will be one unified amount, and current Employer’s NI can be eliminated and incorporated into Corporation Tax, or increased minimum Employer’s Pension Contributions etc… – no doubt that will be of similar sum to the current PAYE and NI combined.
At which point, the only thing HMRC are missing out on is the difference in tax rates between PAYE and dividends.

Robin’s point is well said. The establishment are comfortable with tax focus being on ‘income’ of workers and very small businesses. The wealthy derive most of their riches from their invetsments/assets…..not their payed income or professional fees.

It’s that accumulated wealth that should be drawing the tax payer’s (Tax Payer’s) attention. I see IR35 as a ‘barrier-to-entry’, set against the Demos, of operating as a company and enjoying those favourable tax arragements on assets/investments/dividends…..insulating the elite (those descendants of William the Conqueror and his 200 or so baron knights 🙂 ) from competion from the hoi polloi

Hello ‘ChB Says’ – could you tell us more? Who was the intermediary? Could you perhaps write a pice for the FLI?

When this contract finishes and the housing market picks up I’m selling and leaving the UK.

This is not right dividends are taken for may reason including entrepreneur putting money into businesses, Stocks and shares are alos paid has dividend.
The original idea behind IR35 was correct to stop a permanent person becoming a contractor overnight and doing the same job. That needs to be inplace. Its the changes that i warned about in 2016 that have caused the problem.
The fear factor is there, all companies have to do i go to IR35 sheild or QDos or Knightsbridge and get the SDS done but this i not taking place on 75% of IT contracts. You will not i have not put CEST 1) it has not been updated for 5 years which includes a lot of cases lost by the HMRC 2) They have broken the standards Committee code of practice by withdrwing it from open source.
Until HMRC are regulated for the abmisall way they hound tax payers with tax payers money nothing will get done about the IR35 or Loan charge
The HMRC have created a brain drain already with people work worldwide
The HMRC have created a vacum for people who need to do contracts away from where they live because its contract block spot.

All of this IR35 stuff just goes away with one simple tax change: Make tax rates for dividends the same as for PAYE. But of course, the MPs in parliament who get most of their income from investments, will never make that change. Remember that when you talk about contractors paying their fair share. This whole IR35 thing is really about the well-to-do preserving a privilege they have reserved for themselves. I’m not claiming that any of it is fair. And the next time they show you a shiny bauble intended to keep your attention, keep this thread in mind.