Uber and VAT

[havoc]

The Mad Monk said:

So will Addison Lee and everybody else including 'arry's minicabs, the Arches, 'ighgate.

No?

Depends on the terms and conditions of the contract between cabby and 'agency' - the tighter the control the agency has over what the cabby does, how much he charges, and especially who the end-customer pays (inter alia), the closer it comes to an employer/employee relationship.

I'll let someone closer to the issue confirm, but I think Uber are specifically coming unstuck because Uber's standard model is that the customer pays them not the cabby...which muddies the customer/supplier waters very significantly.

Typically you pay a minicab (or black cab) driver directly, and they'll have a contract with the call-centre where they pay a set fee or % for work provided to them. That's sufficiently clear to be agency / principal, NOT principal / employee as a lot of people say Uber is.

[anonymous-user]

The Mad Monk said:

So will Addison Lee and everybody else including 'arry's minicabs, the Arches, 'ighgate.

No?

You will have seen specific mention of Addison Lee in the FT article linked yesterday. Draw from that your own conclusions

[PF62]

janesmith1950 said:

The last VAT ding dong I was involved with (with about £1m at stake) took 18 months from asking HMRC for clearance to them giving 'an opinion' (adverse to us). By the time I left the company they still hadn't issued an assessment so nothing was particularly formal by that time.

Rather risky for HMRC and gambling with the 12 month rule letting that run without issuing a protective assessment.

[anonymous-user]

The case about the cofidentiality level applied to the broader hearing is today

Just one update - with a bit of a leading comment - on it from Maugham so far

https://twitter.com/GoodLawProject/status/11920746...

[hyphen]

Thank you for keeping us updated, appreciated

[anonymous-user]

Maugham says it is now "reasonably clear that, following Good Law Project's decision to issue the judicial review against HMRC, HMRC has assess Uber to VAT"

https://twitter.com/GoodLawProject/status/11959627...

https://www.dropbox.com/s/vsej2y0hcvdlzqw/Good%20L...

[anonymous-user]

The court says that the existence, or not, of a protective assessment can be made public

https://www.dropbox.com/s/f3prcbho4e6rmsr/Approved...

Edited by anonymous-user on Tuesday 19th November 17:57

[anonymous-user]

I am not sure which of the 97 Uber threads to put this on, but will try here. Uber has lost its licence. It may be that legal fisticuffs shall ensue.

Please excuse American spelling of licence in link below.


https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/25/uber-stripped-of-i...

[hyphen]

It's a bit odd that they can continue pending appeal, when the ban is based on a safety issue.

But TFL have said 14,000 incidents relating to this driver ID swap issue so they have the evidence, and now it's public, Uber will have pressure worldwide to put a stop to it.

[anonymous-user]

Undoubteldy an appeal will follow

Meanwhile, I'm watching for the SEC filing here

https://investor.uber.com/financials/default.aspx

[anonymous-user]

Whether to implement a to suspend a decision pending an appeal is always a tricky one. Should Mr Crim go to jail while waiting to see if the Appeal Court thinks that he is Mr Not Crim? Should Contract Breaker Ltd pay a zillion dollars in damages whilst waiting to see if the Appeal Court thinks that it is Contract Upholder Ltd? And so on...

[The Mad Monk]

hyphen said:

It's a bit odd that they can continue pending appeal, when the ban is based on a safety issue.

But TFL have said 14,000 incidents relating to this driver ID swap issue so they have the evidence, and now it's public, Uber will have pressure worldwide to put a stop to it.

Uber's man was on telly earlier. He said they reported it to the authorities. They have rectified situation.

Electoral Commission records show that in 2015, Sadiq received almost £100,000 from three anti-Uber trade unions.
GMB: £20,000
TSSA: £15,000
Unite: £60,000

[skwdenyer]

The Mad Monk said:

Uber's man was on telly earlier. He said they reported it to the authorities. They have rectified situation.

Electoral Commission records show that in 2015, Sadiq received almost £100,000 from three anti-Uber trade unions.
GMB: £20,000
TSSA: £15,000
Unite: £60,000

Uber haven’t said they’ve fixed the problem that led to 14,000 uninsured journeys happening; they’ve said they’re fixing it. In their minds, admitting to a breach of law & promising to fix it sometime is sufficient to avoid sanction.

It may be that they keep failing the attitude test... let a black cabbie try to stay on the road after a spot check because he’ll fix his unsafe cab next month...

[anonymous-user]

Tfl made the decision. The Mayor was involved, but did not make the decision alone. The chances of an appeal succeeding on the grounds of Mayoral bias do not look very promising.

[anonymous-user]

Uber has, predictably, appealed the High Court decision relating to whether HMRC can say if it is has assessed Uber to VAT (the original decision was that the information could be made public)

That doesn't change whether or not HMRC has assessed Uber to VAT, just the right of anyone except Uber and HMRC to know...

[paulrockliffe]

JPJPJP said:

Uber has, predictably, appealed the High Court decision relating to whether HMRC can say if it is has assessed Uber to VAT (the original decision was that the information could be made public)

That doesn't change whether or not HMRC has assessed Uber to VAT, just the right of anyone except Uber and HMRC to know...

I wonder why? I think 'Big Business' would gain a lot from voluntary transparency around tax in general, it would move the conversation away from stuff that's in the public domain - Corporation Tax vs Turnover - and onto the huge amounts of VAT, Employment Taxes and stuff that are paid as a result of operations in the UK.

Fascinating that Maugham has been pushing the line that HMRC are doing nothing, when he knows that he doesn't know if that's true or not. Also fascinating that he doesn't see the hypocrisy in arguing for fair taxation while spending tax payers money and wasting Court time arguing that HMRC should have to tell him whether the fundamental assumption behind his action is correct or not.

If he was interested in good use of public resources he would wait until the issue was resolved through the due legal process, before clogging the courts up with stuff that may well be rendered irrelevant in due course.

[anonymous-user]

Uber has permission to ask the appeal court to overturn the high court decision that said HMRC could tell the public if it had, or had not, assessed uber to vat

[havoc]

paulrockliffe said:

I think 'Big Business' would gain a lot from voluntary transparency around tax in general, it would move the conversation away from stuff that's in the public domain - Corporation Tax vs Turnover - and onto the huge amounts of VAT, Employment Taxes and stuff that are paid as a result of operations in the UK.

You wouldn't happen to own your own business, would you?!? As the above is disingenuous.


"Employment taxes" are largely suffered by the employee not the employer:-
- NIC is (almost - 12% vs 13.8%) 50/50 between the two until you get above £50k a year salary, when the burden tips towards the employer
- PAYE is wholly suffered by the employee and is (for all above c.£20k earnings) greater than the E'ees NIC burden.

So for companies to claim "employment taxes" that they've contributed to the Exchequer would be rather disingenous.


Furthermore, VAT is suffered by the ultimate (or first non-VAT registered) consumer of any product/service - everything else up to that point is offset as input tax. Which is to say that in 90% of cases the consumer suffers the VAT.

So again, companies cannot logically claim that they are contributing VAT to the Exchequer, as they are only the means of collection.



In conclusion, with a very few exceptions such as E'rs NIC, companies only actually pay Corporation Tax, while individuals pay NIC and PAYE (as employees) and VAT (as consumers). And Capital Gains Tax, and Inheritance Tax (now once again only for the properly affluent / rich), and I've probably missed a few others...

...so companies get a fking easy ride in the UK, quite frankly. And I say this professionally as a chartered accountant.
The multinats will claim they can base themselves anywhere so all that 'employment' doesn't have to sit in the UK and if we try and tax them more they'll move, but in many cases they need access to the right skills and the right suppliers. So it's far from clear-cut.
Plus the current mood-music against online companies is long long overdue, and is only not happening because the Trump administration are sponsored by many of them and is overtly threatening any country that tries to tax them.

[Murph7355]

havoc said:

You wouldn't happen to own your own business, would you?!? As the above is disingenuous.

"Employment taxes" are largely suffered by the employee not the employer:-
- NIC is (almost - 12% vs 13.8%) 50/50 between the two until you get above £50k a year salary, when the burden tips towards the employer
- PAYE is wholly suffered by the employee and is (for all above c.£20k earnings) greater than the E'ees NIC burden.

So for companies to claim "employment taxes" that they've contributed to the Exchequer would be rather disingenous.


Furthermore, VAT is suffered by the ultimate (or first non-VAT registered) consumer of any product/service - everything else up to that point is offset as input tax. Which is to say that in 90% of cases the consumer suffers the VAT.

So again, companies cannot logically claim that they are contributing VAT to the Exchequer, as they are only the means of collection.



In conclusion, with a very few exceptions such as E'rs NIC, companies only actually pay Corporation Tax, while individuals pay NIC and PAYE (as employees) and VAT (as consumers). And Capital Gains Tax, and Inheritance Tax (now once again only for the properly affluent / rich), and I've probably missed a few others...

...so companies get a fking easy ride in the UK, quite frankly. And I say this professionally as a chartered accountant.
The multinats will claim they can base themselves anywhere so all that 'employment' doesn't have to sit in the UK and if we try and tax them more they'll move, but in many cases they need access to the right skills and the right suppliers. So it's far from clear-cut.
Plus the current mood-music against online companies is long long overdue, and is only not happening because the Trump administration are sponsored by many of them and is overtly threatening any country that tries to tax them.

By an extension of that same logic, companies don't actually pay any tax at all.

I'm actually comfortable with that concept and wish more of us would be... As whining about how much CT the big players pay is missing the point by a country mile.

The rules are the same for all companies. But with scale and global footprint comes leverage.

Should we change the way taxation is applied according to size of firm? Maybe. But to what end? And what would be the unintended consequences when the tax code is already stupidly over-complicated.

Personally I wish we'd keep focusing on expenditure. Overall tax intake is already at very high levels. The pot is not bottomless. But our desire to spend appears to be (despite the it being under better control... At least as of now).

As for Maugham's antics. Fans believe he's fighting the good fight for us all. Non-fans think he's an arse. Another polarised viewpoint of today

[anonymous-user]

Noises now that uber has been assessed to £1.5bn of VAT

That’s quite a chunk of poke

Whether HMRC has any real prospect to collect (any of) it remains to be seen. But if it has raised the assessment, it thinks it can.

https://twitter.com/goodlawproject/status/12326304...