Comments
BUT BUT BUT!
|
Mon, 04/12/2006 - 13:13 |
Permalink
"It is expected that thousands of casual traders will be buying and selling online in the run-up to Christmas without realising their obligations to the taxman. "
so at what point does it become trading? The "intention" test sounds like a recipie for disaster to me.
Perhaps Gordon might like to demonstrate in this season of goodwill that he is more Robin Hood than Sherrif of Nottingham, and sort this particular mess out?
Related links
Trading?
I agree that the difficulty lies in the subjective nature of the trading tests. However, I suspect that HMRC will be targetting only those obvious cases, which generally fall into two camps, based on the nature of the goods and the volume of transactions. Someone buying the latest X-Box, for instance, knowing that it can be re-sold at a profit due to demand, will be caught (it need be only 1 such transaction). Likewise, someone purchasing several of the same item and then putting them up for sale will be caught.
The latter case is perhaps more obvious, but the point is that if it is obvious then the trader should know himself of his obligation to register.
As always, though, there will be those cases in between and there may be innocent parties caught out. What about the father who purchases X-Box for son's Xmas, but son also receives one from his aunt. Father then sells one on eBay (at profit). Clearly he is not a trader, but he may have a bit of explaining to do.
As I say, though, even though only 1 transaction may be caught, I do suspect HMRC will go after the easy fish - the multi-transaction dealers as these are easy to spot on eBay. Having said that, it is also easy to carry out a search on completed sales of particular items. If Revenue have the resources, I suppose they may well be carrying out searches of sales of those items (they will know the purchase price) and then perhaps taking issue with those generating profit over a certain level.