Government launches off-payroll review
The government has announced a review of the roll-out of its off-payroll working rules, but industry specialists have expressed concern that the analysis will not result in any meaningful change.
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Bit late in the day given the rules bite essentially from 1st Feb, assuming an end of month bill and 30-40 day payment terms.
Also a bit late given that many employers have already kicked their subbies out of companies and made firm arrangements for the new scheme.
Also, the review is more about how the rules shall be implemented rather than considering their overall need/existence. We shall not be very hopeful for a positive outcome unfortunately.
My money is on this being a pre-cursor to a 12 month implementation delay. There's no other explanation, given the very short timescale and the fact that the new CEST tool was only wheeled last month. HMRC have form in this sort of thing. Off the top of my head I can recall the "new" CIS scheme, the SRT rules and MTD, for all of which the roll-out was delayed by at least 12 months.
The reason is invariably because HMRC "over-promise" delivery timetables to their Treasury masters, only for it to dawn on them very late in the day that they are simply not ready. And they will then claim that the delay is because their "customers" are ill-prepared and need more time.
My money is on this being a pre-cursor to a 12 month implementation delay. There's no other explanation, given the very short timescale and the fact that the new CEST tool was only wheeled last month. HMRC have form in this sort of thing. Off the top of my head I can recall the "new" CIS scheme, the SRT rules and MTD, for all of which the roll-out was delayed by at least 12 months.
The reason is invariably because HMRC "over-promise" delivery timetables to their Treasury masters, only for it to dawn on them very late in the day that they are simply not ready. And they will then claim that the delay is because their "customers" are ill-prepared and need more time.
I think the government are only going to look at how to have a smooth implementation of the reform. I believe this reform was suppose to come into the private sector on 6 April 2019 but then got delayed. My money is firmly on this reform going through on 6 April 2020. It has already been operating for nearly 3 years in the public sector.
I don't understand how the big contractor accountancy firms such as Clearsky, SJD, Brooksons, JSA, Nixon Williams, Crunch, etc are going to cope with this new reform? Sure their umbrella operations may get bigger but what about their accountants in the accountancy side. Surely a few redundancies ahead? I am assuming their accountants must currently be leaving these firm in big numbers. The next Thomas Cook or Toys R Us could be a contractor accountants? However I believe John Stokdyk wrote a good article on how crunch is currently adapting so maybe they will be OK?