Hammond plans tax crackdown on synthetic self-employed

From the BBC:

The Treasury is finalising plans to overhaul tax rules which allow self-employed people to avoid paying national insurance contributions. The move will be targeted at people who set themselves up as private companies to take on work.

The BBC understands it could be announced in this month’s Budget. The Treasury believes a third of people claiming self-employed status as a “personal service company” are actually full employees and should pay more tax.

Quite simply, employment income is taxed at insanely high rates. Self employment income and income routed via a company are just taxed at high overall rates.

So this is bound to happen, and anybody who thinks they are on the right side of the line will do this. And plenty of people who clearly aren’t. Presenting a regular daily or weekly TV or radio show is slap bang in the middle of any sane definition of ‘employment’ FFS.

The answer is simple. Merge VAT, National Insurance, income tax and corporation tax into a single rate of tax applied to all earned income at the same rate. You can make it less regressive with a personal allowance or a Citizen’s Income credit.

Until and unless they do that, this sort of tomfoolery will continue and we go in ever decreasing circles.

It says without reform, high levels of non-compliance with tax rules could cost HM Revenue and Customs, which collects taxes, £1.2bn a year by 2023.

Sod off, it costs HMRC nothing. That’s like me counting all the goals I never scored in a Cup Final. It costs ‘everybody else’ £1.2 bn, because they have to pay in more to make up the difference.