HMRC have issued their Agent Update for December 2015: we have summarised the key content for you.
SME Tax News
The government's Cobra emergency committee has agreed that households and businesses affected by the severe weather and flooding in Cumbria and Lancashire will be given relief from council tax and business rates.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, has announced that the government will publish its next Budget on Wednesday 16 March 2016.
The liquidators of former Rangers football club and the Murray group companies are to appeal against the recent decision of the Scottish Court of Session that found that EBT loans were actually remuneration.
In Ardmore Construction and Andrew Perrin v HMRC [2015] UKUT 633 the Upper Tribunal (UT) confirmed that loan interest paid by UK residents had a UK source even though the loans were not governed by UK law.
In Flix Innovations Ltd v HMRC [2015] TC04710, EIS relief was denied as a company's ordinary shares carried preferential rights on winding up.
In order for shares to qualify for tax relief under the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) they must meet a set of qualifying conditions. They must be unredeemable ordinary shares and, depending on the date of issue under section 173 ITA 2007, must not contain any preferential rights, including no present or future preferential right to the company's assets on its winding up.
All change for the AIA: the capital allowance rules change on 31 December 2015.
In his 2015 Autumn Statement, the chancellor announced that there would be two changes to the qualification criteria for the government's Tax Free Childcare account which is being introduced in 2017.
Please note: further changes have been made to the scheme since the Autumn Statement announcement, see Tax-Free Childcare for the latest details.
The chancellor omitted to mention the majority of the new measures that the government has proposed for the 2016 Finance Bill when he presented his Autumn Statement last Wednesday. In this guide we fill in the details for SME owners and tax advisers.