View all articles
Tax planning is perfectly legitimate, but tax avoidance is not. Legitimate companies do a great job providing useful advice to help landlords mitigate property tax, but in the wake of the government’s 3% stamp duty surcharge, enquiries from landlords and property investors has snowballed.
******Whoops! Looks like this is an old post that isn’t relevant any more :/ ******
******Visit the blog home page for the most up to date news. ******
Tax Planning Schemes
We all know tax hikes are never popular, so when George Osborne announced he was introducing a 3% stamp duty surcharge on second properties, landlords were never going to be happy.
The majority of people are stoic about such things – in other words, they pay up. However, according to an investigation by the Telegraph, there has been a big rise in the number of tax firms flogging tax schemes that claim to help landlords avoid the stamp duty surcharge. These firms claim their schemes are backed up by legal advice from high-profile law firms. One firm interviewed by the Telegraph says enquiries shot up from one or two a day, to as many as 20 per day.
HMRC Warns Landlords to Beware
HMRC has issued a warning to landlords considering buying into a ‘tax planning’ scheme:
“These kinds of schemes don’t work. We have investigated thousands of cases since 2013, bringing in over £200m in SDLT. These individuals have had to pay 100 per cent of the original tax due plus interest.
“They will be much worse off than if they had just paid the right tax at the right time, especially where they have paid fees to the promoter of the avoidance scheme which are not refundable.”
