The following Business Briefings have been written by Alan Pink to advise clients about specific business issues relating to current regulations and potential courses of action. You are welcome to download these documents in PDF format, subject to our copyright conditions (see end of page for details).

MASTERCLASS - Helping You To Understand Payments On Account
The payment on account regime aims to spread the income tax and Class 4 national insurance payments of individuals taxed under self-assessment. The benefit for HMRC is that payments to them are accelerated. For individuals whose income is fairly consistent year on year the system accelerates the payments to HMRC but other than that there is no major impact on cash flow.... read more >>>

IN THE PINK - Get Tax Relief For Selling To Yourself
You can secure effective negative rates of taxation where you own anything intangible, including goodwill, that is or can be put to use in trade. Goodwill is probably the easiest, as well as most frequently found, example to use. First, though, we need to clear up, a common misunderstanding. Most people believe that, if a company that you own acquires from you an intangible asset, then that asset isn’t eligible .... read more >>>

TOPICAL TIPS - Could Your Records Cost You Dear?
We all know the benefits of keeping good business records. Amongst other things accurate and up-date records enable us to monitor the performance of our business, manage cash flow and obtain finance. HMRC already provides guidance on what records should be kept and for how long. However the new penalty regime and the proposal by HMRC to introduce business record checks should make .... read more >>>

UNCONVENTIONAL WISDOM - The rough end of the stick.
The business structure which consists of a partnership including a limited company, in which the other partners have the shares, has a number of tax advantages at the moment, and what follows, we think, is certainly one of them. Companies have one huge tax advantage as compared with individuals: they pay tax at a much lower rate, where the total income is more than about £42,000 per individual.... read more >>>

DID YOU KNOW?
Most people know that there’s no capital gains tax on your own home. And the tax exemption extends not just to the house itself but also the garden. But it’s in this exemption for the garden of the house that tax problems often arise in practice. Typically, a person might have a very large garden, or fields adjoining the garden, which have development value, and obviously it would be nice if the land could be sold to the developer.... read more >>>

IN THE PINK - Preserve Your Inheritance.
It’s amazing how often people seem to go out of their way to pay too much tax. A good example of this is the business structure which we are about to describe. Sometimes inheritance tax considerations and practical and commercial considerations seem to be at war. For example, you’re running a trading business, say, and the principal asset of that business might be the property from which the business is carried on.... read more >>>

Capital Gains Tax - A trumped up tax charge
Our tax system delights in imposing tax charges on occasions where no-one’s received any profits. In this year’s Budget they are adding another one, which is legislation to give statutory effect to the case law rule in “Sharkey v Wernher” which itself was a fine example of judicial dottiness dating from the 1950s.  The rule said that... read more >>>

Have fun and save tax at the same time
For the Summer, we thought it might be fun to have a quick run down of the various ways in which leisure and enjoyment can impact on tax – and provide opportunities for saving it!... read more >>>

Wipe out your Inheritance Tax - At a single stroke
Although death is inevitable, inheritance tax, that ghoulish, macabre tax which counts days of survival and looks at a person’s whole life and assets at the point of death, is by no means something that one needs to view in the same fatalistic manner. Inheritance tax is avoidable, and this month’s article is all about what can be a very dramatic inheritance tax mitigation strategy indeed... read more >>>

Loophole of the month - Take a year out
The age old problem in tax planning where you have a limited company under your control is: how do you get money out of the company without being clobbered for tax? If you pay it to yourself as remuneration or salary from the company... read more >>>

Tax investigations - When negotiations break down
The last in our current series of how to deal with what our transatlantic brothers refer to as a “tax audit” deals with the situation where you and the Tax Inspector just can’t agree. Fortunately, our tax system doesn’t leave us completely to the mercy of the civil servants, but... read more >>>

Tax tip of the month - Beware IR35; it's still alive and dangerous
The all out war between the taxman and the one man service company has been going on so long now that most people are getting a little blasé about it.  But all of the weaponry devised by HM Revenue & Customs is still out there, and one of the most controversial... read more >>>

The Business Column - Save tax and feel good about it
This month I am inviting those of our readers who run a business with me on an arduous journey to the moral high ground.  It's not an area that business people tend to be very used to - not, in my view, because standards of right and wrong are any less marked in the business community as compared with employees and those dependent on the income of others... read more >>>

The Business Column - Starting a new business
Everyone’s got to start somewhere, and if it wasn’t for those intrepid entrepreneurs who are willing to face the many hurdles and barriers that life and government throw at new businesses, our economy would soon take a nose dive. Fortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any shortage of new start ups... read more >>>

The Property Column - Avoiding the VAT traps on buying and selling property
VAT is a European tax. VAT is ruthlessly logical. The trouble is, perfect logic doesn’t necessarily mean that the system will be predictable or even comprehensible to anybody except the specialist... read more >>>

Whatever happened to the 2008 Budget?
Some readers have asked us whether we propose to do a Budget summary this year.  So far we’ve rather “picked at” some of the more important changes, here and there, but we certainly haven’t done an overall review. So the purpose of this piece is, as we have done in previous years, to highlight the tax proposals... read more >>>

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