Self Employed Travel Expenses

Self Employed Travel Expenses

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Having read Horton / Newsom / Powell / Jones / Samadian / Jain, and bim37600 / bim37605 / bim37620, I believe there are aspects of the home being a "place of work" which are still to be tested.

The cases HMRC have won (ie. most of them) use language where "working" from home is "admin / paperwork", rather than the actual work of the trade or the profession itself.

Newsom appears particularly harsh, but it should be noted that there appeared to be no assertion that the real stuff of "Barristering" was done at home, eg. meetings and giving opinions, as would be done at chambers. Would the outcome be different if that was what happened?

In the medical (and allied) professions, there are many practitioners who have an external clinic, and also really do work from home - ie. seeing patients / clients.

So, say 3 or 4 days at the clinic, or even attending another practitioner's clinic, and also seeing patients / clients at home, and also at their homes. On top of this there is then the reports and admin at home. (I dare say that for many accountants the scenario is not too dissimilar)

So is this sufficient to establish the home as a place of work / base of operation, for the purposes of claiming travel expenses between all the other work places? Or would a travel expenses claim fail purely on the rather grey "itinerant" test or the more "regular pattern" tests?

 

 

 

Replies (6)

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By Duggimon
18th Jan 2017 16:29

IIRC, Samadian saw patients at home and still had his claim disallowed on the basis that travel to and from home will always fail the wholly and exclusively test because the home is not used wholly and exclusively for business.

It might yet get tested further as there are always minutiae that render each case different from the last leaving them open for appeal but it's starting to look fairly definitive that travel from home will always be commuting and disallowed unless there is no other place of business.

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Replying to Duggimon:
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By Portia Nina Levin
18th Jan 2017 16:55

Samadian did not see patients at home. He kept patient records at home and had a secretary at his home office. It was wrongly decided though; had it been correctly decided he would, however, have still lost. He did the rounds at one of his hospitals 6 nights a week!

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By Portia Nina Levin
18th Jan 2017 17:05

Whilst the tribunals are diligently following the "base of operations" approach from Newsom, and are now finding that people have more than one base of operations, Horton elaborated on the principle.

Whilst HMRC use Horton to say that if there is a regular predictable pattern then the travel expenditure is not allowable, what was actually said was that Horton's expenditure was allowable because he had no predictable pattern. You cannot just, necessarily turn that around on itself.

For example, I buy Zovirax because I have herpes. Just because my next door neighbour does not buy Zovirax does not mean she does not have herpes. And she has been around the block, let me tell you.

What Horton correctly did was to look at the "locus in quo" of the business (and there can only be one, unless we are going to make omnipresense a requirement of claiming travel expenses) and said that if the business activity radiated around that locus in quo then the travelling expenditure is allowable.

It is likely that "the clinic" is the locus in quo in the circumstances the OP described. You will need to be incurring a shitload of travelling expenses for it to be worth taking HMRC on over this though, given that the tribunals are now their "[***]" when it comes to travel expense claims.

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Replying to Portia Nina Levin:
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By Gone Sailing
18th Jan 2017 17:30

Yes but ...

"The clinic" may be "the place" but it may also be "a place" (of several) and the law accepts there can be more than one "place" of work. The 'centre of (work) gravity' doesn't really do it for me. Many businesses are binary stars, but I'm running out of analogies.

So if HMRC are binging on non-sequiturs to fill in the blanks are we keeping our fingers crossed or denying our clients valid claims?

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By Portia Nina Levin
18th Jan 2017 17:50

The law (to the extent that it is law) incorrectly accepts that there may be more than one place. Both Newsom and Horton consider that there is only one place.

FTT decisions are not binding, and so the only precedent there is where it was considered that there was more than one base is Samadian, which I consider to have been incorrectly decided.

There may be more than one place where the business is a partnership,

Otherwise we get a ridiculous situation where a trader is expected to be omnipresent, as in Noel White, a flying instructor, who the FTT found had bases at both Shoreham Airport (10 miles from his home) and Bournemouth Airport (over 100 miles from his home).

In the case you describe, you do not have a hope in hell though. You are walking straight into Samadian, such as it is, as Dugiwhatnots says.

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Replying to Portia Nina Levin:
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By Gone Sailing
18th Jan 2017 18:06

Yes but ...

W&E claims can be made for the use of home. So the medical professional is travelling between two "W&E" claim places, albiet that one is not "W&E" 100% of the time.

Anyone ever tried arguing that the 'home office' is not the 'home'?

I'm resigned to your conclusion though, now for the tricky bit ...

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