Category Archive for "Articles"

1. Play ‘Leapfrog’ The reason inheritance tax (IHT) is such an insidious tax is because it attacks family wealth, like a sort of cancer, every generation. But often, you simply don’t need to submit to this regular erosion process. Let’s

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…

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…

There are times when conventional wisdom seems so obvious, but is actually the complete reverse of true wisdom. Maybe the best example of this in the tax planning sphere is the idea that you should pass businesses down to the younger generations. What we’re talking about here is trading businesses, and the same basic principles apply whether you’re looking at a partnership, LLP, or limited company structure…

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)?…