Archive for February, 2018

Biker club wins VAT case

Monday, February 5th, 2018

Many clubs offer members a range of services for their membership fee. For example, membership may include a members’ magazine. Ordinarily, a magazine subscription should be zero rated for VAT purposes, but when the magazine element is bundled into a general club subscription – that is standard rated for VAT – problems can arise.

HMRC is prone to view the “bundled” price as a standard rated supply, whereas the affected organisation would prefer to separate out the zero-rated element thus reducing the cost to their members.

In a recent case, the Harley Owners Group challenged such a fixed supply argument raised by HMRC. They argued that the members’ magazine was a separate supply and should be considered zero-rated, and the courts agreed.

The delivery of mixed services under an umbrella membership subscription is an area of VAT law that is far from clear. However, HMRC has lost a number of cases recently with a similar outcome to the Harley Owners Club.

Getting ready for Making Tax Digital

Monday, February 5th, 2018

As our regular readers of our newsletter will be aware, the government has back-tracked on their original proposal to digitise taxpayers’ affairs.

The original plan, to have most self-employed traders and landlords uploading accounts and VAT data from April 2018, was scrapped.

The new plan, delayed until April 2019, requires traders registered for VAT, and with turnover above the current £85,000 registration threshold, to upload their VAT figures digitally direct from a HMRC software interface. HMRC has offered, somewhat tongue in cheek, that taxpayers not required under these revised criteria, are non-the-less welcome to upload their VAT numbers this way on a voluntary basis.

The outcome of these changes requires affected businesses to use compatible software – to link with HMRC – from April 2019.

Those VAT traders who are still using a manual record-keeping process, or IT solutions that will not be recognised by HMRC’s systems, will need to upgrade to more suitable software during the next year.

Clients and other VAT registered business owners that are concerned about their readiness for these changes should call for advice. Clients who use our VAT services can be assured that we will use software that is MTD compliant.

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