The government’s website now publishes the Loan Charge Review and sets out the government reply through Jesse Norman’s response. The government is changing its treatment of pre December 2010 loans and pre 2016 where full disclosure was made and no HMRC Enquiry launched. The position remains complex and each person involved still needs to sort their affairs out with the Revenue on a case by case basis. I suggest constituents affected should read the detailed Review and response and if necessary take professional advice on it. The government also clarifies its position on terms and timings of payments, to seek to avoid anyone’s home being at risk.
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December 22, 2019
I have very little sympathy with the Loan Charge people. Anyone who gets offered a tax avoidance scheme that looks too good to be true and swallows it hook line and sinker deserves everything they get. I mean what sort of person thinks that its perfectly viable to receive a Uk income as a UK domiciled taxpayer, and pay no tax on it because of some legal shenanigans? You’d have to be soft in the head to think HMRC are going to let people get away with it. It was obvious from the word go that receiving income as a’loan’ that everyone knew you weren’t going to have to pay back was not a legitimate use of the exemption of loan income from tax, and that there was a very good chance that HMRC would come knocking on your door at some point.
After all, what about all the other people who had similar incomes and declared them properly and paid their taxes over the last 20 years? Why should some people be given a free ride worth tens or hundreds of thousands of tax payments just because they were a combination of greedy and stupid?
I say this as a lifelong Tory voting, self employed person. I have always minimised by tax due using legitimate tax avoidance measures, but if someone had offered me a way of paying no tax at all, I’d have been looking for the hidden camera. The Loan Charge people just let their greed overcome their common sense.