Tax guidance for self-employed Brits such as umbrella company contractors is set to finally get a bit more easy, thanks to a new initiative.
Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs has finally admitted that it’s simply too hard for freelance workers to access tax guidance. To that end, the taxman is going to slowly begin to make it easier to not just browse through the HMRC guidance website but to print, search, and view as well. Some 100,000 webpages will be transitioned over to a new gov.uk website steadily from now to sometime in 2014.
Of course, there’s a fly in the ointment when it comes to this new plan: you’ll still have to visit the existing HMRC website in order to use any of its other online services. That’s right, you still won’t be able to file an online tax return without going to the old site.
For what it’s worth I do appreciate the lengths the taxman is going in order to make things easier when it comes to tax guidance. Still, is it too much to ask for to have everything in the same damned place? I mean let’s be honest here – does it matter how well-organised this new information is when you’ve still got to go to the old site to get the lion’s share of your work done? It seems mad to me!
And let’s not forget that much of the so-called tax guidance for contractors is about as a screen door on a submarine. I mean shall we so quickly forget the massive IR35 debacle that we all had to deal with back when HMRC updated its guidance but neglected to actually change any relevant law? If you don’t have any recollection, let me jog your memory: suddenly you were, according to the guidance, at a higher risk for being found within the disguised employment rule than you were before the guidance changed, despite the fact that the laws had remained the same.
So let’s reiterate: the taxman is putting all its tax guidance into one new, more easily accessible place. This is good – except when HMRC gives us wrong or inaccurate information that doesn’t even match up with existing regulations. And let’s not have any sort of false hope here – we’re talking about the Government. We’re lucky they all don’t light themselves on fire at the local garage in a freak petrol fight accident.
