All Tax and legislation articles – Page 45
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Article
Care workers paid below minimum wage
More than 2,400 employees in the care sector have been paid below the national minimum wage over the past two years, according to an investigation by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC).HMRC looked at jobs across the sector and investigated 224 employers, with some investigations still ongoing.Eighty-eight cases have been found ...
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Article
HMRC offers tax settle opportunity on EFRBS
HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has offered employers the opportunity to settle the tax arising on employer-financed retirement benefit schemes (EFRBS).The settlement opportunity is open until 31 December 2013, with enquiries to be settled by 30 June 2014.EFRBSs are discretionary trusts set up by an employer to provide benefits for ...
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Article
HMRC wins £300k bonus tax avoidance case
HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has won a case that would have avoided nearly £160,000 in tax and national insurance (NI) contributions on an employee’s bonus.The owner of a Cirencester-based pharmacy, LM Ferro, had received advice on how to extract value from the organisation in a tax-efficient manner.Tax advisory firm ...
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Article
Government publishes update on employee ownership
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has published an update on employee ownership, one year after the government’s response to The Nuttall review on employee ownership.The update, The Nuttall review of employee ownership: one year on report, said that progress has been made against all 28 of the review’s ...
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Article
NAPF publishes guidance on remuneration policies
The National Association of Pension Funds (NAPF) has published its latest Corporate governance policy and voting guidelines.The guidance includes:New remuneration principles against which investors can judge an organisation’s pay policy and its appropriateness for that organisation.More robust expectations for corporate accountability.Greater emphasis on corporate reporting of extra-financial factors, including risks ...
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Article
ABI updates guidelines on executive remuneration
The Associate of British Insurers (ABI) has published the annual update of its guidelines on designing and operating executive director remuneration.The 2013 version of its Principles of remuneration are intended to apply for 2014 annual general meetings and annual reports.The updated version includes:Performance adjustment/malus and clawback: The update provides a ...
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Article
Collective pension could provide 33% better outcome
Collective pensions could provide a 33% better outcome than individual provision, according to a report by David Pitt-Watson (pictured), lead for the Tomorrow’s Investor programme at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA).The Collective pensions in the UK II report, which follows on from its ...
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Opinion
Jill Clucas: Changes to pensions lifetime allowance
Accruing benefits above the value of the lifetime allowance is permitted. However, once an individual has used up his or her LTA, any further benefits will be subject to the LTA charge of 55% on lump sums and 25% on pension income, which will also be subject to income tax. ...
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Article
Royal Mail staff must wait for full shares allocation
Royal Mail employees will not receive their full free share allocation until April 2014.Using calculations based on a maximum share price offer of 330p per share, the 150,000 eligible full-time employees were due to immediately receive around 725 free shares each, while part-time staff would receive a smaller number of ...
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Article
Court blocks offshore bonus tax avoidance scheme
A £31 million offshore bonus tax avoidance scheme operated by Aberdeen Asset Management has been shut down by a Scottish court.The FTSE 100-listed fund manager paid senior employees and directors bonuses free of income tax and national insurance contributions (NICs), between 2000 and 2003, using an employee benefits trust (EBT).The ...
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Article
Enhanced redundancy payments for older workers not discriminatory
The judgement, on 11 October, relates to the case earlier this year of Romily Lockwood v Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) and Cabinet Office in which the former administrative officer for the DWP claimed that the voluntary redundancy scheme offered by the organisation discriminated against her because of her ...
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Article
Multinationals unprepared for expatriate tax and payroll issues
Multinational employers do not have the adequate procedures in place to track tax, payroll and immigration issues for employees on formal or informal overseas assignments, according to research by EY.Its Your talent in motion: global mobility effectiveness survey 2013, which questioned 264 senior global mobility professionals, found that, despite this, ...
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Article
Age-related pension contributions not discriminatory
The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled that age-related employer contributions to pension schemes are lawful and not discriminatory to employees.The case of HK Danmark v Experion A/S 2013 concerned an organisation that set up a pension scheme for employees in Denmark with employer contributions at the following rates: ...
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Article
HMRC tackles pensions tax abuse
HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has made a number of changes to strengthen existing processes to tackle the attempted misuse or abuse of the pension tax rules, deter pension liberation and safeguard employees’ pension savings.The changes, which took effect from 21 October, include:Registering a pension scheme: HMRC has made the ...
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Opinion
Diana Bruce: Zero-hours contracts could be advantageous to employees
In response to September’s Big Question, Should zero-hours contracts include minimum benefits provision?, by offering workers on zero-hours contracts a minimum benefits provision, there is debate that [employers] would then, in effect, be treating them as employees rather than workers, entitling them to certain statutory rights. The priority here, as ...
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Article
Bank of England and FCA respond to remuneration report
The Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) have both published their responses to a report on a revised remuneration code for the banking industry.The Changing banking for good report, which was published by the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards (PCBS) in June 2013, made a series of ...
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Article
New guidance on public sector pension transfers
HM Treasury has published new Fair Deal guidance on the transfer of public sector pensions.The new approach to Fair Deal set out in the guidance, Fair Deal for staff pensions: staff transfer from central government, aims to ensure that staff compulsorily transferred out of the public sector will continue to ...
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Article
Tax on benefits-in-kind should be equal
More than three-quarters (81%) of respondents said benefits-in-kind should all be taxed at the same rate, according to research by the Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals (CIPP) and the Association of Accounting Technicians (AAT).The research, which surveyed payroll and accountancy professionals, is in response to an Office of Tax Simplification ...
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Article
Consultation on executive pay published
The Financial Reporting Council (FRC) has published a consultation on executive remuneration.The consultation follows legislative changes, which came in on 1 October, which made votes on remuneration reports binding.It will cover three specific areas:Clawback arrangements.Whether non-executive directors who are also executive directors in other organisations should sit on the remuneration ...
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Article
National minimum wage increases
The national minimum wage has increased by 12p to £6.31 an hour for adults on 1 October.The rise follows recommendations made by the Low Pay Commission in April 2013.Other changes include:Employees aged between 18 and 20 years will see a 5p rise, from £4.98 to £5.03.Employees under the age of ...