This month…

Over the last few months, I have been speaking on this newswire slot about the status of the new Off-Payroll Tax that was due to come in on 6th April and at the last minute was deferred until April 2021. This was very much to do with the Lords Committee enquiries into the tax and their examination of witnesses from the Treasury and HMRC which left the Lords wholly underwhelmed.

This week, we saw a Lords letter to Jesse Norman at the Treasury continuing to ask them difficult questions about their intention that Off-Payroll should start in April 2021, when the Lords are saying that much real analysis of the laws needs to be done. Dare we hope that the Lords will manage to get the whole Off-Payroll Tax looked at again and in a fair way.

However, Off-Payroll and IR35 seem a distant issue. Amazing that it’s just over a month that this was so prominent in all our minds. How fast things can change! Now, we are hoping on a worldwide basis that governments will get in control of the COVID-19 pandemic for the sake of people’s health which is of course most important. The economic wellbeing of the country and the freelance world is secondary to health issues but it is also essential, so we hope that our Government can balance the health and economic issues and steer us to wise decisions. I wouldn’t want that job so will not be standing for election as Prime Minister in the near future.

At Cogent in recent weeks, it has been our aim to help our clients as best we can in these very difficult times. To that end, we have set up a process to make the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) grant applications on behalf of our clients at no cost. We have found this to be an extremely time consuming project but, in our opinion, when clients have stopped working with COVID-19 related issues, we want to be loyal to our clients and help them in whatever way we can so there will no charge for us making this grant claim on behalf of clients. I hope that we can help each other build our business relationships and look forward to the end of this pandemic soon and a return to full economic prosperity.

The Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme is only available to companies where they have lost their income, so if you are continuing to work this is not relevant to you.

Please contact us if we can help in any way – simply send an email to tax@cogentaccountants.co.uk and we’ll be in touch.

Victor Korman
Managing Director
Cogent Accountants