Talking-up Scotland

HMRC seem to be as hopeless at recouping tax revenues from curious beeb Scotland employee tax arrangements as they are at raising even minimal taxes from the oil majors operating in the Scottish Sector. Bet the Norwegian equivalent of HMRC would be closing down all these curious tax arrangements in the blink of an eye. Link and snippet below: (Nice wee earner that Kaye has found herself with beeb Scotland ain’t it? – my thanks to a post on Wings alerting us to this strange situation)

https://www.accountingweb.co.uk/tax/hmrc-policy/hmrc-plays-fast-and-loose-with-ir35-rules

Loose Women presenter Kaye Adams has triumphed over HMRC, which demanded £124,441 in PAYE and NIC from her personal service company on the basis that IR35 applied.

The dispute concerned two contracts with the BBC to present a series of programmes on Radio Scotland in the periods 16 March 2015 to 31 March 2016, and 4 April 2016 to 31 March 2017. HMRC had also raised assessments under the IR35 rules in respect of income from contracts operated in 2013/14 and 2014/15 but effectively dropped the tax demands for the earlier years just before the tribunal hearing.

The tribunal concentrated on the written contracts between the BBC and Atholl House Productions Ltd, which required the company to provide the services of Kaye Adams to present “The Kaye Adams Programme” each weekday morning on BBC Radio Scotland. The contracts specified that at least 160 programmes would be presented for a minimum fee of £155,000, and any further programmes would be paid for at a rate of £968.75 per programme. In other words, the company was paid a “piece-rate” of £968.75 per programme.

The question of whether Adams was obliged to provide her services to the BBC and if the BBC was obliged to pay her (a mutuality of obligation) centred around the issue of who had first call on Adams’ time.

The BBC did exercise editorial control over the content of the programmes, but it did not have control over Adams’ work outside of BBC Radio Scotland. The BBC could sanction Adams retrospectively if she took actions which brought the BBC into disrepute but that did not amount to control.

The BBC contracts in the two years covered by this case amounted to around 50% of Adams’ income in that period, but the tribunal thought it inappropriate to view those two years in isolation in respect of her overall professional career.

The written contracts gave the BBC the right to ask Adams to attend editorial training and to undertake a medical, but it never exercised those rights. The tribunal concluded that Adams was not seen as part of the BBC organisation but instead as an external services provider. (Nice work if you can get it as the saying goes).