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Can we now be blasé about admin errors such as public liability insurance and cross-billing ?
I'm guessing no and my advice will continue to be that failure to keep the businesses separate will give rise to a risk.
Traders got lucky, in my view.
Definitely agree, while I can see it being possible and even reasonable to split the businesses into separate entities I don't think they did enough to be sure of this result, very lucky indeed.
There's no reason to make such a mess of it either, to my mind it better demonstrates the all important "intent" if they actually treat them as separate businesses and not just let these things slide.
Insurance is something folk constantly overlook. I've lost count of the number of folk who think their van is still insured once they sell it to their brand new company.
Mind you, the peelers probably think it is insured, because they don't re-register it at DVLA either.
This seems a little more believable than the Belcher case. That one really was a questionable decision!
I think the key here was the separation of sole trader and partnership. The article doesn't go into the wife's role in the second business. Perhaps the intro by Neil Warren is misleading
'Vaughan traded as a plasterer, but he also carried out a separate trade providing liquid floor screeding using equipment funded by a council grant.'
I am amazed, they seem close enough to me, bearing in mind builders advertise a range of services on their vans, so going forward what do i advise clients, take a chance and split your businesses, they should get away with it.
Sorry for being a know-all, but the various sayings concerning history are that it is always doomed to repeat itself!
Good article, though. :)
Not quite. The saying is 'Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it'. So if the HMRC took a similar case to court as these two cases and lost, the saying might be apt, depending on the circumstances of course.
"The saying?"
There are dozens of them.
https://www.azquotes.com/quotes/topics/history-repeats-itself.html
George Eliot probably the earliest in this batch. But I doubt if she was the first.
Actually, Neil, the old saying is that history does repeat itself. This is Karl Marx's take: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”