Some haulage companies may be on purpose offering spurious advice to so-called ‘self-employed drivers’ very nearly their tax liability 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 carefully frustrating to offload their tax and NI liabilities onto pure drivers. The results for the drivers themselves could be argumentative and shape make miserable in the same way as HMRC.
What’s Going On?
If you’re a company giving out a fleet of vehicles and employing drivers, next 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 keep you money, mature and effort.
Some haulage companies are correspondingly infuriating to persuade drivers to start concerning themselves as physical ‘self-employed’ in order to reduce their costs and thereby allow them to find the money for subjugate prices in this extremely competitive industry.
What’s Wrong?
The misery is that HMRC (aka the Tax Office) doesn’t accept that an individual driving vehicles for unorthodox company is, typically, ‘self-employed’. They are completely aware of the attempt of some employers to bypass mandatory contributions in such a fashion.
There is after that a health and safety issue, as some employers aren’t paying the required employer’s liability insurance premiums they should and covering their employees accordingly.
HMRC assume a completely dim view of schemes where a company tries to describe their employees as ‘self-employed’, fittingly some haulage companies are frustrating to take action concerning that by offering inappropriate advice to individual drivers to “work on a self-employed basis” even similar to such an other isn’t retrieve 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 top tips to save in mind:
• Your potential customer is NOT accountable for your tax affairs. YOU ARE! So, discuss your precise matter with HMRC and get the facts from the horse’s mouth suitably to speak.
• That similar customer is not far off from no question NOT an impartial tax advisor. Their interests and yours are not one and the thesame in this respect.
• Typically, HMRC will not take your status as living thing self-employed if you steer for choice company using their vehicles and in force licences etc.
• You can next be fairly determined that the thesame will apply even if you steer for several rotate haulage companies below the thesame support as above.
• In order to be considered self-employed, you will compulsion to be the registered owner of your own vehicle and have effective licences and insurance in your own name or that of your own company. Don’t listen to any advice to the contrary unless it comes from HMRC or perhaps your own attributed accountant.
Stay Aware
HMRC are usually extremely unimpressed by claims along the lines of “XYZ told me differently” and save in mind that, below law, ignorance is rarely an satisfactory 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 habit to save child maintenance upon tax and NI – unless you enjoy the prospect of some enormously long and longing discussions similar to HMRC and possibly the courts.
Article Tags: Haulage Companies
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