If your individual income is between £50,000 and £60,000 the tax charge will be 1% of the Child Benefit you have received for every £100 your income is over £50,000.

If your individual income is greater than £60,000 you will have to repay all the Child Benefit that you have received. This can either be done as part of your Self-Assessment Tax Return or alternatively you can opt to pay back the Child Benefit through your PAYE tax code, you can also opt to stop receiving future Child Benefit payments altogether if you want.

To find out whether or not this new tax charge will affect you, please follow the link to HM Revenue & Customs ‘Changes to Child Benefit’ Flow Chart.

If you would like to discuss this please contact your at Morgan Harris.

Fuel scale charges are paid when input VAT is reclaimed in full on fuel that your business buys which can then be used for private purposes.

Please follow the link for the Updated Fuel Charges.

If you have any queries please do not hesitate to contact or your at Morgan Harris.

I got one of these on Saturday. The letter looks very official, as though it has come from H M Revenue and Customs (HMRC) and asks you to complete your VAT number and sign an application. Effectively, if you sign the form you are committing yourself to advertise and be included in a business directory at a cost of £797.00!

If you receive one of these letters, my advice is to put it in the bin. In no way are you legally obligated to complete the form. It appears from my research that letters similar to these were sent to businesses in Scotland last month- see the attached link to Trading standards article by Inverclyde Council.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact via email or telephone me directly on 01993 899955.

The government sees that there needs to be pension reform as they have come to the conclusion that millions of people are not having enough money put aside to pay their future state pensions. With life expectancy in the UK increasing there is more pressure on the system in terms of paying future pensions. The government wants to encourage people to increase the amount they are saving for their state pension so that the pension will provide them with a more acceptable level of income in their retirement. They see that enrolling workers into improved workplace pension schemes will help with this.

To check when you, as an employer, should join the scheme please follow the link to the Pensions Regulator website. You will need your PAYE Reference number and then input two words when prompted and it will then give you your businesses joining date for the scheme.

For clients of Morgan Harris, if you are unsure of your PAYE reference, please let us know and we can advise you of this. Alternatively, if you like, we can check out the date when you have to enroll into the scheme.

If you require any help, please contact or telephone her 01993 899950. For more information you can also look at https://www.gov.uk/workplacepensions

So, why were Goldman Sachs let off paying a £20million tax bill? Senior officials at HMRC are alleged to have granted Goldman Sachs a “sweetheart deal” effectively cancelling the bill.

This is absolute nonsense, and demonstrates yet again that there appears to be one set of rules for big corporations and another for the rest of us. These massive corporations have all the resources they need to ensure that their tax affairs are in order by a given date. If they fail, then they should be made to pay the penalties and the interest just like everyone else in the UK (businesses and individual tax payers alike).

No wonder small business feel that they are easy targets!

The event will run from 4:30pm until 7:00pm.

The event is not exclusive to clients. If you know us possibly as a business introducer, friend or contact or indeed you may be thinking of changing accountants and coming to us, we will be delighted if you could join us for drinks and nibbles on the 24th.

RSVP by 17 May 2013 to:

deb@morganharrisgroup.com
01993 899950

In total we raised over £700 for our chosen charities Myeloma UK and The Air Ambulance Trust. Thank you to all of the people who sponsored us.

Here are some photos of the day.

It seems that at last HMRC are at least addressing the cost of the call issue. They have announced that they are currently changing across to 03 numbers which we are told should be cheaper. It remains to be seen whether calls are answered by a “real person” any quicker!

We understand that at present some people on certain BT and O2 packages get calls to 0845 numbers for nothing. I wonder if phone providers will include 03 numbers in their free packages in the future.

Using his previous records as a guide, he should complete both runs in under 10 seconds each, meaning he will earn around £25,000 per second of race time!

Until a recent announcement by the Chancellor, George Osborne, it would have been very unlikely that Bolt would have attended the event. Osborne announced that there would be an exemption for non-resident athletes for the tax bill they face from HMRC. Previous to this, stars would have had to pay not only a percentage of their appearance fee to the taxman, but a proportion of their worldwide income too. Given that last year Bolt earned an estimated £20million, without this exemption the event would have been a very unattractive prospect!

The event held at the Olympic Stadium over 3 days (26th -28th July) will also feature some of the other big names from Team GB including Jessica Ennis, Mo Farrah and Greg Rutherford.