Tax tips newsletter for professionals

In last month’s article, I set out the background to HMRC’s long-standing policy concerning income tax relief for business proprietors’ own training costs. I went back as far as 1991 – not as arduous as it might sound because nothing had really changed in the more than 30 years since then, until 2024.  

Lee Sharpe explains why HMRC’s apparent new-found largesse in terms of proprietors’ training costs may well amount to less than the sum of all its parts. 

Offshore life policies (OLPs) are often also referred to as offshore bonds. Such policies are policies issued by offshore life companies.  

Malcolm Finney outlines the tax treatment of offshore life policies.  

Where chosen wisely, a company car can be a very tax-efficient benefit. This will be the case where the employee’s car is a cheap, low-emissions model. By contrast, the tax hit on an expensive, high-emission car can be significant. A further tax charge may arise where the employer also meets the cost for private journeys in a company car.  

Sarah Bradford explains the rules for taxing the benefit of a company car in 2024/25 and outlines future changes. 

It is common practice for pension funds, in the form of self-invested personal pension schemes and small self-administered schemes, to purchase commercial properties and rent them out using the rental income to finance the pension fund, with the building being held as an asset of the fund. 

Andrew Needham looks at the VAT consequences of owning a property in one’s pension fund. 

Mark McLaughlin reviews two recent important tax cases:

In the early 2000s, it was common practice to find property held within the trading company. As this was the primary source of revenue, it was cheaper than extracting monies via dividends or salary and then buying the property out of net income. 

Simon Howley considers the main issues associated with incorporating a property portfolio, with commentary on the recently-issued HMRC Spotlight 63. 

One of the benefits of trading via a limited company is that the owner has the freedom to determine the timing of when and how to remunerate themselves, a luxury not afforded to unincorporated traders, who are broadly taxed on trading profits as they accrue (or alternatively on a cash basis).

Joe Brough looks at the options available for owner-managers to maximise the extraction of profits from their company in a tax-efficient way..