Posts Tagged ‘TIIN’

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Small firms impact: not waving but drowning [Part 2 of 4]

February 5, 2015

A TIIN is supposed to answer seven questions.  (They are here in the TIIN instructions – the TIIN instructions still aren’t published by HMRC – and why not??? – but let’s assume the basic principle is still the same as “in my day”.)

The questions are:

What are you doing?

Why are you doing it?

Why are you doing it this way?

What will it cost/raise?

What will it cost the customer?

What will it cost the department?

Are there any other impacts?

“Why are you doing it” is a powerful question in the “better regulation” mindset, which basically reflects a worldview in which regulation is a Bad Thing in and of itself.  The idea is that regulation is nothing more than Red Tape, which would be Strangling Business unless it was itself regulated.  “Why are you doing it (at all)” is really the question, if you think that having no regulation at all is the ideal.

So why is the government doing MOSS at all?  Well let’s see.  The policy objective field of the TIIN (still on page A111) is where the answer ought to be, and it says:

Policy objective The measure will make business to consumer (B2C) supplies of BTE services taxable where they are consumed, thereby removing an incentive for businesses to locate offshore. This will level the playing field for UK BTE suppliers and is consistent with the Government’s aim of fairness in the tax system. The MOSS business simplification scheme is intended to reduce the administrative burdens and costs associated with this rule change and multiple VAT registrations for BTE suppliers, particularly for small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

Translated into English, I think this means there are two objectives:

  1. The main objective is to stop big companies from gaming the system by setting up shop somewhere with a low VAT rate.  Instead of VAT being charged where the supplier is located, from January 2015 it is charged (for electronic services like e-books) where the customer is located.  So small companies should have a more “level… playing field… consistent with the Government’s aim of fairness…”
  2. Because this change comes with associated costs for small companies, there will also be the “mini one stop shop”, the MOSS, which stops you having to register for VAT separately in each member state and instead handles it all in once place, the place the seller is located.

Now, I think the objectives are good ones in themselves.  Let’s make it easier for authors to sell their own works, for craftswomen to sell their own knitting patterns, for musicians to sell their own tunes, directly to the customer without having to lose a slice of their profits to a multinational selling for them.  And, yes, let’s keep the administration as simple as possible.

So what went wrong?

Let’s go back to the TIIN, to the summary of impacts that starts at the bottom of page A112.

Screenshot 2015-02-05 14.14.50

The first line shows you how much money the government expects to get as a result of this change.  The numbers are in millions of pounds, and the plus sign means the government expects to get this much tax in from the change.

The first few months of 2015 are still in the 2014-15 tax year (the tax year runs from 6th April one year to 5th April the next year).  So between January 1st and April 5th 2015 the UK government estimates it will make £70 million in VAT from the changes.  In a full year, it thinks it will make an extra £300 million plus, with the numbers rising over time.

I think we can all agree three hundred million is a sum worth having.  For the government, it’s the cost of, say, the entire NHS radiotherapy service (table 9 page 28, 2011-12 figures).  But look at this: “The MOSS element of the measure is expected to have a negligible impact on the Exchequer.”

Now, I understand “negligible” in an impact assessment to mean “less than £100,000 across the entire affected population”, which is what it used to mean in 2012 when I was last working for the government.  But have a think about that.  The entire farrago of MOSS is expected to bring in less than a hundred grand?  Seriously?

Because one of the seven questions written into the tax original impact assessment proposals, and which was still there when I obtained the TIIN instructions and published them on my blog, is

why are you doing it this way???

Why the hell are you imposing this business-busting system on people from whom you expect to raise peanuts, when you’re still going to get the moolah you want from the big businesses it’s really aimed at?  Is this really the only way?

Option appraisal is one of the key elements of impact assessment methodology: generating and assessing all the possible ways of solving a possible policy issue and then choosing the best one, even if it’s the option to “do nothing” – that’s how governments tell themselves they solve problems.

So where is the options appraisal in this TIIN?

Don’t bother to look.  It isn’t there.

Look instead at the assessment of the economic impact.

This measure should have positive economic impacts by minimising distortions to the location of the economic activity and increasing competition between large and smaller suppliers within the sectors affected.

Well perhaps it “should”.  In an ideal world it would.  But in this imperfect world, HMRC completely overlooked the one-woman kitchen-table microbusiness and introduced a system which, far from “minimising distortions” and “increasing competition” will in fact wipe out the micro businesses or else drive them into the arms of the very businesses whose behaviour caused the policy problem in the first place.

A proper options appraisal might have included:

  • excluding micro businesses from the regulation altogether
  • allowing a longer lead in time before the regulation affected small and micro businesses
  • unilaterally setting a threshold below which the regulations do not apply
  • making payment processors legally responsible for operating the regulation
  • devising a MOSS which itself operated as a payment processor for micro businesses (instead of a paypal or worldpay etc button you could have a MOSS button – your money would come to you VIA the government, but come to you guaranteed VAT-compliant)

There might have been good reasons for and against any or all of these.  But if you don’t ask the right questions of the right people, well, you’ll never know, will you?

 

Posted in Bit of politics, Consultation, HMRC, Regulation, VAT, VATMOSS | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments »

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Small firms impact: not waving but drowning [Part I of 4]

February 4, 2015

Let us all wave to the House of Commons *waves* and then again to the House of Lords *waves*, our law makers.  Let us ask them to look again at a couple of the bits of paper that have been put in front of them and which have gone through on the nod.

Let’s start here, with a parliamentary question asked by David Morris, the Conservative MP for Morecambe and Lunesdale, on 22nd January.  Now I know nothing about Mr Morris beyond his website (the government has a Hairdressing Council?  Seriously?) and his wikipedia entry (and I can’t say I’m that sanguine about the veracity of all of that!) but Parliament.uk, usually a reliable source, gives small business as one of his interests.

So good for him, asking about the VATMOSS assessment of the impact on small business.

David Gauke’s reply was to refer him to the TIIN, published (on page A111 of the package of TIINs published on 10 December 2013 to accompany the draft clauses of the 2014 Finance Bill)

Let’s pause for a minute while you open up another screen, click on the link, and find page A111.  You might want to print it out, because we’ll be referring to it a fair bit over the next couple of entries.

Now to start with, what are we looking at here?  What is a TIIN?  Well I happen to know, because I was in the team that kind of accidentally invented the TIIN, when I was in charge of the Impact Assessment programme for tax measures.  An impact assessment is a formal document assessing the costs and benefits of making a regulatory change, and don’t get me started there (that’s what my PhD is about, amongst other things) and has to be done according to fairly strict protocols.  If you’re interested, there’s a hundred and eight pages of guidance you can access from this link (It was only 95 pages in my day).

At the point the coalition government came into office, there was a proposal to change the impact assessment template to make the format much tighter – to compel you to put an actual number to the costs/benefits and to put the numbers into the same format, essentially so that BIS could track the numbers across the whole government.  But that kind of impact assessment isn’t particularly helpful for tax changes, because the amount of tax raised or foregone is normally much greater than the administrative burden of the change itself.  So there was a lot of internal civil service politics around whether tax changes should be in or out of the new system, and this coincided with the move to improve the process of tax policy making itself, and the outcome was the invention of a tailored tax impact assessment process… but at the last moment the Treasury decided they wanted to combine the tax impact assessment with the Budget Note which HMRC used to produce explaining tax changes, and so we wound up with the Tax Information and Impact Note, the TIIN.

The TIIN, then, should explain what is being done and why, and include an assessment of the costs and benefits – to the exchequer, to the “customer”, and to HMRC.  It should also give the outcome of any other impacts which have been assessed, including equalities and other impacts to which governments have committed themselves (see the list on page 34 here and on page 66 here)

So.  David Gauke is telling us – is telling Parliament, in fact – that this TIIN contains the government’s assessment of the impact of the VATMOSS changes.

Let’s see what it says then, shall we?

First of all, look at the bottom of the first page, “background to the measure”.  This says:

Background to the measure

The measure was announced at 2013 Budget. Business input has been provided through joint business/HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) groups.

Now, if you have been following the #VATMOSS #VATMESS hashtags or the articles in Taxation about POSMOSS you will know that one of the principal complaints of the micro and nano-businesses whose kitchen table businesses are likely to be wiped out by the change is that they were completely overlooked in the consultation process.  So who was representing small businesses on these “joint business/HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) groups”?

I honestly don’t think that’s an unreasonable question to ask.

So I asked it.  On November 25th last year I sent a friendly email to the person who is named as the contact on HMRC documents, saying that it might well just be my google-fu was lacking but I couldn’t find the minutes of these meetings online as I’d expect so could he please point me to them?  I thought it was more than likely that the links was buried somewhere on gov.uk but just in case it wasn’t, I said if they weren’t yet published, would he please consider this a Freedom of Information Act request?

I had no reply.  But then I’d guessed at his email address (HMRC email addresses are usually in the format firstname dot lastname @hmrc.gsi.gov.uk but they can vary, after all) so on 11 December I put the request in formally via the HMRC Freedom of Information Act “portal” and had an acknowledgement telling me that

A response is being prepared and the statutory deadline is 13 January 2015.

On 21 January I sent another polite reminder asking why I hadn’t had a reply yet.  And on 30th January I received a reply.

Apparently

The external membership consisted of: Publishing: 3 small businesses Online Gaming: 2 small businesses Digital Services: 4 small businesses Other sectors/organisations: 3 representatives

but

I do not consider that there is a particular public interest in releasing the names of the micro or small businesses/organisations involved.

Now just a minute…

There used to be a handy page on the HMRC website that listed all the consultative groups, with links to their minutes and memberships.  It’s not there on gov.uk (well if it is, I haven’t found it yet!) but some individual groups are.  Look, here’s the Joint Customs Consultative Committee, the Research and Development Consultative Committee, the Joint VAT Consultative Committee (which, oh look, discussed MOSS on 8th May 2014…)

Are we seriously arguing that it’s a secret who the government talked to about introducing VAT MOSS?

No-none is planning on descending on the consulted businesses with pitchforks and torches – no responsibility resides with someone being consulted in answering for themselves and their own knowledge.  But there is a HUGE responsibility on HMRC and other government departments to ask the right people – to seek out and talk to the affected businesses.

Yes, I’ll be following up the FoI request – watch this space – but the arrogance (or defensiveness?) of saying there’s no public interest in knowing who HMRC consulted with, when the whole point of the outcry is that there are large numbers of people saying “I’m affected!  Who was representing me?”…. well, I think it’s just staggering.

Posted in Consultation, Taxpayer confidentiality, VAT, VATMOSS | Tagged , | 4 Comments »

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Three. Probably.

January 15, 2014

A search on “open consultations” in the category “HMRC” on gov.uk today tells me there are three open consultations.  I’m not sure I believe them after the shenanigans I reported on in my 7th January post (customer service tip: if someone tells you a site isn’t working, the least helpful response is “I don’t currently see any technical problems…”) but let’s roll with it.

The three are:

Real time information: legislative changes.  Opened 29th November (so why didn’t it show up when I searched on the same terms on 7th January?) and it closes on 24 January.  Incidentally, wouldn’t it be really, really helpful if you could search on closing date on gov.uk?  Or at least that you could tell from the search results when the consultation closes and didn’t have to click through to find out?

Onshore employment intermediaries: false self-employment.  Opened 10 December, closes 4 February.

Assistance with electronic filing of VAT returns.  Opened 20 December, closes 14 February.

So let’s start with the Real Time Information (RTI) one.  RTI, in case you didn’t already know, is the PAYE equivalent of Universal Credit – it’s the New! Improved!  All-singing!  All-dancing! method of making sure that Universal Credit will work because the government will know, from timely information from employers, who has worked where and when, so people will – perhaps, if it all works, fingers crossed – finally be able to dip in and out of paid work without screwing up their benefits for six months.

But from an employer’s viewpoint, it’s a royal pain.  You have to report payments to employees when you make them, not at the end of the month or quarter or year or whenever you can stop to draw breath.

There’s little point looking at the actual consultation, because this is one of the Finance Bill consultations – in other words, the policy has already been decided and we’re not being asked for our opinions on whether it’s a good idea or not, just for technical comments on whether or not the regulations that have been written will actually work as described.  And I don’t really feel like doing the government’s unpaid copy-editing for them this morning so we’ll skip that.

There are a few interesting things we might want to think about, though.

First of all, the TIIN (surprise!)  They aren’t publishing a TIIN with this because they’ve already published one.  In fact they’ve published two, one for the penalty regime here and one for the actual policy change.

The one for the penalty regime says that there will be no actual exchequer impact.  In fact the government says it doesn’t expect to get any money in from these penalties at all, or at least an amount which shows up as “nil” on a TIIN.  If memory serves, that’s something like a quarter of a million threshold (grateful if anyone can confirm or amend this figure please?)

That’s a good thing, of course.  The point of penalties is to change behaviour, not to collect money.  The idea is that people should make the change to RTI and get used to sending the same information they would always have sent, just a bit earlier and in a different way.  I can see two problems with that.

First of all the level of the penalty.  It needs to be a “smacked wrist” amount – enough that you know not to put your hand into the fire but not so great that your parents get done for child abuse.  So if you’re a small business with up to nine employees, it’s a hundred quid.  Enough to make you want not to incur it, but not enough (one hopes!) to bankrupt you.

But look at paragraph 16 of the condoc:

16. Regulation 67I sets the size of the late filing penalties as follows:

 £100 for schemes with 1 – 9 employees;

 £200 for schemes with 10 – 49 employees;

 £300 for schemes with 50 – 249 employees; and

 £400 for schemes with 250 or more employees.

If I have 300 employees on the average wage of £26,500 then I’m paying out over half a million in wages every month (£26,500 x 300 / 12 = 662,500).  Now, in comparison to £662,500, is £400 a “smacked wrist” or is it, well, peanuts?  An amount which it might very well be worthwhile my incurring so I can sort out my RTI submission at my own pace?

In other words, I think they got the gearing of the penalties a bit wonky.  But it’s too late now, we’re not being asked to comment on that.

Secondly, as I have commented before, there’s not a great deal of point charging “smacked wrist” penalties if you don’t actually go out and collect them, and is HMRC now committed to sending someone round to knock on the employer’s door if they incur a £100 or £400 penalty and explain to them how it arose and, more to the point, what they can do to avoid incurring another?  Otherwise I think that “exchequer effect – nil” may turn out to be, shall we say, optimistic?  Or should that be pessimistic?

And finally, what about the equalities impact?  I said in my response to the consultation on the actual policy that I was worried about the impact on “care and support” employers, which is HMRC jargon for people who have employees but who aren’t businesses.  People who employ nannies, for example, or, more worryingly, people who are given a “care budget” instead of a home help and have to get on and organise their own support package including paying their carers and working out the tax due on their pay.

In the TIIN for the actual policy it says under equalities impacts that

Care and support employers will also have the option to file RTI on paper, and those wishing to use this option will report RTI from April 2014. This date has been deferred from April 2013 in line with customer feedback, to allow more time for HMRC to thoroughly test the new paper forms and guidance with customers who will use them.

So.  We’re not publishing another TIIN.  We’re not updating the equalities impact, then?  Has there actually BEEN any testing of the impact on care and support employers?  Are they happy, or at least confident they’ll be able to comply?  Does anyone know?

Sigh.  I’d write to my MP again, but it’s Nick Clegg and I think he’s probably getting sick of hearing from me about inadequate government equality impact assessments by now.  Over to you.

Posted in Consultation, Employment, HMRC, Regulation, RTI, TIINs | Tagged , , | 2 Comments »