When there is no contribution then the couple are avoiding paying tax; and there are clear examples of this. This is unfair on the majority of tax payers, whether one likes that truth or not.

Without intruding into the lives of the owners of every privately owned company and looking into the operations of that company over an extended period of time how can HMR&C determine the correctness of that couple’s income statements. The easy way to simplify this is to preventing couple’s from working together; this will prevent small companies from starting up and put some companies out of business. Perhaps capping the amount that can be paid for administrative support, when it can be demonstrated that one of the couple does not generate income could work; but it must be demonstrated to be a fair cap. But when husband and wife are fee generators or involved in the day to day trading such a cap would be unfair, and how could that be demonstrated without ‘complicated’ tax policing.

The principle may be correct, but the reality is that there is no ’simple’ way of changing the current situation, while encouraging business growth.

It’s entirely reasonable, surely to expect a married couple to have a joint bank account, therefore they’re essentially being prosecuted for being married. In fact if they weren’t married, even with a joint bank account, would they have been stitched up successfully?

Would be interesting to know how much ‘unpaid’ tax had been recovered vs how much public money was spent prosecuting the case.

FOI request, anyone?

Yes no problem. Please email admin@contractingme.com with the link when it is live

Admin

I have a question for the webmaster/admin here at http://www.contractingme.com.

May I use some of the information from your post above if I give a backlink back to this website?

Thanks,
Oliver