Tinkering round the edges
I recently left the profession as I had become wholly disillusioned both because of the ridiculous burden of regulation placed on me as a sole practitioner and because of the burdens placed on my clients. It was not so much that the clients suffered these burdens, but more the burden that I felt in trying to keep them abreast of them. If they lapsed you may be sure that it was seen as my fault.
These proposed changes are frankly laughable. They will do very little to change things.
The problem with the system now is that succesive governments have made the burden of regulation so utterly outrageous that a few chnages like this are applauded as meaning signifcant improvement when in actual fact all they do is turn the clock back a couple of years or two. We were fighting for a reduction in burdens on business during the Major administration for goodness sake. Things have only got worse. This represents nothing more than tinkering around the edges.
What is needed is a radical, major reform which, whilst it continues to ensure that we are all tax payers, removes from us the burden of being assessors and collectors as well.
Abolition of Form P11D
It is hardly radical to omit non-taxable expenses from form P11D. It is probably what many employers and their advisers do already on the grounds that the compliance effort is out of all proportion to the uselessness of the information. What would be radical is to require employers to process all benefits in kind through the payroll; the value would be added to gross pay, subjected to both tax and Class 1 NIC and the same value deducted from net pay. The employee would suffer tax at the time he enjoys the benefit, not years later when the Revenue gets round to processing the P11D. Forms P46(Car) & P11D would be redundant along with Class 1A NIC and there would be no need for adjustments to PAYE codes.
Euan - what a good idea....
....those businesses that keep good records would then get some reward from reduced reporting.