With the Comprehensive Spending Review grabbing most of the headlines recently, the vexed subject of the future of IR35 legislation may have enjoyed less limelight but it certainly hasn’t gone away. The Office of Tax Simplification (OTS) has been diligently continuing its work of exploring reform and has just been joined by four private sector tax experts to help it review small business taxation. The UK’s contractor workforce may draw some comfort from the appointment of Kate Cottrell, an HM Revenue and Customs officer in a former life and currently an IR35 expert with the firm Bauer and Cottrell. Ms Cottrell will be one of the voices representing the interests of contractors on the panel.
Others include Thomas Byng, a senior manager with the major accounting and consultancy company Deloitte, Partha Ray, a senior tax manager at BDO and Caroline Turnbull-Hall, a senior manager at BwC. OTS Tax Director, John Whiting expressed his delight at the appointments and added his gratitude to the teams which had released such a highly experienced group of experts to help in the task of simplifying the UK’s byzantine tax system.
The panel is expected to produce an interim report specifically addressing tax simplification for small businesses in time for next year’s Budget. The Chancellor, George Osborne, famously described the UK’s existing tax laws, including the notorious IR35 legislation, as a bewildering “spaghetti bowl when he set up the Office of Tax Simplification. We’ll have to wait and see whether the newly augmented panel can untangle the legal spaghetti and serve us with a slimmed down “nouvelle cuisine” alternative.
