Which Planet Do They Live On?…

Apparently it’s my turn to write one of these things, what with the usual contributor being on a cruise ship somewhere in the Mediterranean. Having never attempted one before (or for that matter never even contemplated doing so) where do you start, especially for someone who’s luddite tendencies are widely known amongst my circle of friends ?

A quick search on the internet provided the information that a blog is “a record of your thoughts, opinions or experiences that you put on the internet for other people to read”. Oh dear, I’m an accountant and as such (as Monty Python once observed) my opinions are of interest to no-one.  As for my experiences, well you really don’t want to know and I am definitely not telling. However, being somewhat cynical, I actually do have plenty of thoughts and opinions, whether or not they are of interest to anyone I really don’t know.

The advice is to cover matters that you know about and will be of interest to your readers – this sort of suggests it ought to be about what is going on in the world of accountancy and tax and the answer (unfortunately) is plenty.

Let’s start with our “beloved” Chancellor who has just announced increases in the rates of national insurance for the self employed in order to make things fairer. Ha ha, does he actually believe tax is fair – if so I’m not sure what planet he is on. What he is doing, of course, is simply trying to take more money from “Joe Public” and that is what tax is really all about. It has nothing to do with fairness, if it did he might consider the various benefits that the self employed do not receive starting with paid holidays and the national minimum wage. If you’re self employed please don’t ever sit down to work out how much you earn for the hours you put in. What he (and his advisors) have also not realised is that a lot of people are not necessarily self employed through choice – more and more companies are wanting to reduce their staffing levels and are looking to self employed contractors to fill the gap (frequently these self employed are the former employees). It’s a “great trick” if you can pull it off – no more maternity pay, no more holiday pay, no more work place pensions and goodbye to employee rights as you’re no longer an employee. The trouble with this rant is that The Sun apparently agrees with me and is campaigning to have the NI increase scrapped. To be fair I don’t think national insurance is necessarily the worst tax of the multitude we suffer – in my opinion that dubious honour belongs to Insurance Premium Tax. This really is a great scam, I mean to tax something that is a legal requirement (car insurance) is the height of unfairness (Mr Hammond please take note next time you are looking to make things fairer).

Also changing for the worse is the simplified Flat Rate Scheme for VAT. Seems that HMRC and the Treasury have realised that certain business sectors have been abusing this scheme to save themselves a bit (actually in some cases quite a lot) of VAT. Obviously one would expect that steps would be taken against these particular businesses to close this loophole but no they take out the HMRC sledgehammer and ruin the scheme for a whole tranche of businesses that were operating the scheme for perfectly legitimate reasons.

And don’t get me started on the farce surrounding business rates or we’ll be here all day (yet another way for government to remove money from business)…

Now, of course, we all know that politicians don’t really know what they are doing or what real life is all about but how many times have we been told what is good for us only to have the advice reversed at some point in the future. Currently it’s diesel cars which are, apparently, the work of the devil (only 2 or 3 years since they were the way forward). Based on a recent scientific article I read the next thing is going to be biomass (or burning wood to you and I) – seems this isn’t so clean and environmentally friendly as they had us believe.

Anyway back to accountancy – major changes are on-going with accounts disclosures and the basis of preparation of these. At the level of company that is our “bread & butter” it is a weighty tome known as Financial Reporting Standard 102 (FRS102 for short) which promised the biggest change in accounts preparation for a generation. Now we all know what this means – a lot more work for people like me resulting in a bigger bill for you. Just don’t blame me as I was more than happy with the previous way of doing things and for most small companies all the extra work produces a set of accounts not much different in appearance to what we had before.

And all this is before we think about the huge changes that will come about if HMRC succeed with MTD (Making Tax Digital) or whatever it is called this week – rather than spending their time with this project it might be better if they just did the obvious things like answering the telephone when it rings or replying to letters.

I suspect (hope) this will be my one and only attempt at one of these things as our regular blogger will be back from her cruise on the Altmark (look it up if you don’t get the reference). SC