Some haulage companies may be carefully offering spurious advice to so-called ‘self-employed drivers’ very nearly their tax answerability status. Don’t drop for that!
A few disreputable haulage companies are offering intensely dubious tax status advice to people notionally regarded as ‘self-employed drivers’.
In some cases their advice may be wrong due to ignorance, but in others they are intentionally trying to offload their tax and NI liabilities onto good drivers. The results for the drivers themselves could be scratchy and shape upset past HMRC.
What’s Going On?
If you’re a company running a fleet of vehicles and employing drivers, after that a fair component of your cost base arises from your employee expenses. Any of those you can offload, including the responsibility to cumulative and pay tax and NI for those employees, is going to save you money, get older and effort.
Some haulage companies are consequently irritating to persuade drivers to begin roughly themselves as visceral ‘self-employed’ in order to shorten their costs and thereby permit them to give demean prices in this totally competitive industry.
What’s Wrong?
The difficulty is that HMRC (aka the Tax Office) doesn’t accept that an individual driving vehicles for unorthodox company is, typically, ‘self-employed’. They are unquestionably au fait of the try of some employers to bypass mandatory contributions in such a fashion.
There is as well as a health and safety issue, as some employers aren’t paying the required employer’s answerability insurance premiums they should and covering their employees accordingly.
HMRC undertake a no question dim view of schemes where a company tries to picture their employees as ‘self-employed’, thus some haulage companies are aggravating to conduct yourself on the order of that by offering inappropriate advice to individual drivers to “work on a self-employed basis” even in imitation of such an different isn’t gate to them.
Top Tips to guard Your Interests
If you are a driver thinking of going self-employed based on advice from a potential customer, here are some summit tips to keep in mind:
• Your potential customer is NOT accountable for your tax affairs. YOU ARE! So, discuss your true concern past HMRC and acquire the facts from the horse’s mouth in view of that to speak.
• That same customer is on agreed NOT an impartial tax advisor. Their interests and yours are not one and the same in this respect.
• Typically, HMRC will not accept your status as living thing self-employed if you drive for choice company using their vehicles and keen licences etc.
• You can along with be fairly positive that the thesame will apply even if you drive for several stand-in haulage companies under the same protection as above.
• In order to be considered self-employed, you will need to be the registered owner of your own vehicle and have functional licences and insurance in your own pronounce or that of your own company. Don’t listen to any advice to the contrary unless it comes from HMRC or perhaps your own endorsed accountant.
Stay Aware
HMRC are usually intensely unimpressed by claims along the lines of “XYZ told me differently” and keep in mind that, under law, ignorance is rarely an ample defence.
The penalties for transgression here can be severe, both for the driver concerned and for the company notionally hiring their services. Be wary of any suggestions from haulage companies that going self-employed is an easy exaggeration to save money on tax and NI – unless you enjoy the prospect of some enormously long and throb discussions afterward HMRC and possibly the courts.
Article Tags: Haulage Companies
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