VAT - Business Splitting
It can be fiddly and time consuming, and HMRC don’t like it. But the device known as “business splitting” is still a very popular method of legally escaping VAT. George Osborne has even, we’re sure inadvertently, made things easier in the March 2011 Budget by increasing the VAT registration threshold from £70,000 to £73,000. So how does business splitting work (or, in some cases, not work)?... read more >>>

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Loss “Alchemy”
Saturday morning. Between sleeping and waking, you hear the rattle of the letterbox coming to you from downstairs, indicating that the postman has been. Who can ever resist that invitation? Donning your dressing gown, you trudge blearily down the stairs and find a brown envelope, marked “HMRC” on your doormat. Your heart sinks, but having feverishly torn open the envelope to find out the worst at once, your mood suddenly experiences a change. It’s a big fat cheque from the taxman, with your name on it... read more >>>

Non Residence and Capital Gains Tax
We’ve mentioned, elsewhere, a possible political driver for allowing non UK residents to get out of paying tax on property rents. This is, briefly, the wish to encourage foreigners to invest in the UK. Another such politically based incentive, no doubt, is the fact that non UK residents are not generally chargeable to capital gains tax here. The UK differs from many other jurisdictions in this respect... read more >>>

The Great Escape - Tax Havens for Fun and Profit
Offshore tax havens are the glamorous side of tax planning, or avoidance if you prefer to use that word. Places like the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, and even the Channel Islands, when mentioned, call to mind images of wealthy tax exiles lounging on palm fringed beaches (well, perhaps not the Channel Islands.) It’s almost unnecessary to say that a lot of this glamour is unwarranted in practice, however not all of it is... read more >>>

Benefits in Kind That Are Fun – And Tax Free!
Our friend the taxman is of rather a puritanical bent, normally, and the tax rules tend not to favour anyone actually enjoying themselves. However, there are one or two ways in which your employer can provide you with tax free benefits that you will actually enjoy, and if you are effectively the employer as well as the employee, of course, so much the better, because then you can benefit from the tax breaks on both sides!... read more >>>

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Year End Tax Planning for Businesses
What you do before the accounting year end of your business can make a huge difference to how much tax you pay. Of course, there are all kinds of things you can do after the year end has actually passed, but what I am going to concentrate on, here, is actions you physically should take before that day passes. If you leave them out, it’s mostly too late to do anything about it afterwards. So, for those that read this in November and have a December year end say, there’s probably time to get your act together, and put the taxman on a strict diet, in terms of the slice of the profits “cake” that he takes from your company... read more >>>

The ABC of Profit Extraction
The subject of this article is probably the one most frequently faced problem in the whole of tax planning: how to minimise the tax you pay on profits you take out of your business. This problem is completely different, depending on whether you are running your business through a limited company or through some other vehicle, but as the limited company is by far the most commonly found business entity, I am going to assume, in what follows, that this is the situation the reader is in. Although I have called it the “ABC of profit extraction”, which suggests a basic survey,I may just throw in the odd swerve ball as well!... read more >>>

Property Investment LLPs
Sometimes it seems as though, the more you look at Limited Liability Partnerships, or LLP’s, the more tax advantages come out of the woodwork. In this piece, we’re concentrating on LLP’s set up not to carry on a trading business, but to hold a property portfolio. At one time it was very popular for property holding companies to be set up: that is, limited companies incorporated with shares etc... read more >>>

The Business Column - Save tax and feel good about it
This month I am inviting those of our readers who run a business with me on an arduous journey to the moral high ground.  It's not an area that business people tend to be very used to - not, in my view, because standards of right and wrong are any less marked in the business community as compared with employees and those dependent on the income of others... read more >>>