“After the lockdown was announced on 23 March, many of the benefits in kind rules were changed around equipment, cars, food and home-working expenses. The concessions are all welcome, but came into effect quite late before the end of the tax year,” Kate Upcraft told AccountingWEB.
For the first week of the new AccountingWEB Live digital webinar season, it made perfect sense to give Kate a platform to diagnose the likely issues and help members prepare compliant P11D reports.
Some of the virus-related circumstances Kate is planning to cover include equipment provided or purchased for home-working employees, telephone expenses and the home-working scale rate, which rose from £4 a week to £6 on 6 April.
Alongside the coronavirus complications this year, Upcraft will flag up some of the other hot issues brewing up around benefits in kind. Over the past year Kate has been noting how HMRC’s stance on trivial benefits has been tightening up around its definition of a “legitimate expectation”.
The classic example in December’s employer update was whether a cream cake provided to an employee every Friday could be considered a legitimate expectation and therefore a contractual obligation that would not qualify for the exemption covering trivial benefits in kind.
The advisory fuel rates were altered on 1 June to reflect the recent drop in fuel prices. As part of her presentation, Kate will go through the new tables and discuss the likely implications for company car users in 2020/21.
If you have any P11D questions, feel free to raise them with other AccountingWEB members in Any Answers, but also register for Kate Upcraft’s P11D tips, traps and tangles webinar on 25 June and bring them along on the day.