It hasn't been long since the new umbrella contractor trade industry body known as All Umbrella Companies Are Equal has launched, but i's making serious waves.
HMRC took on more cases, made more arrests and won more criminal convictions in 2012 than in 2011. With a £900m cash injection, those figures will only rise.
A new good practice charter for umbrella companies has been making the rounds recently in the hopes it will help protect workers' relationships with clients.
The taxman is still struggling to determine what constitutes adequate paperwork for a business or self-employed individual to comply with the Business Records Checks programme.
Within hours on HMRC publishing its IR35 guidance, members of the IR35 Forum issued a statement saying the document did not take key elements of their advice into consideration.
The long awaited IR35 guidance was published on Wednesday. The guidance will enable contractors to determine if their contract is disguised employment or if they really are in business in their own right.
Contractors working through limited companies might be tempted to switch to umbrella companies once the full extent of the Revenue’s IR35 assessment criteria becomes known next week.
IT contractors should be aware that HMRC will track down anybody it believes could be guilty of tax evasion as a Scottish consultant found to his cost recently.
It’s Budget Day tomorrow; the weeks of speculation will be over and UK taxpayers, including umbrella company contractors, will discover what is in store for them over the next 12 months.