With my day job, on the BDO Taxline I deal with a variety of tax questions from our accountant, lawyer and tax professional clients on all areas of tax. The questions are certainly getting more complex and providing the answers is certainly technically challenging.
Otherwise, as a tax technician, I also assist the wider firm with transactions and pension related projects.
If you could make one change to a tax law or practice, what would it be?
Being the firm’s demergers champion, the single change that would make my life easier would be the alignment of the various tax de-grouping provisions, i.e. for capital gains, corporate intangibles and SDLT. The rules for each are similar but all quite different in places, and I have witnessed a few horror stories and near misses. If the rules were all identical, the complexity of demergers would be greatly simplified and associated tax risk reduced.
What do you know now that you wish you’d known at the start of your career?
Advice that I have actually given my sons, one of whom is recently qualified, is to fully engage with the appraisal system. When I started in my career 33 years ago, things were very informal and my attitude was to sit back and expect ‘my brilliance’ to be recognised, which rarely happened. With the development of formal appraisal procedures, we can be much more in charge of our own careers and development. Understanding the system and ‘selling yourself’ is as important today as it ever was.
Are there any new rules that are causing a particular problem in practice?
Leading the pensions tax advisory team, the recently enacted pension rules for the abolition of the lifetime allowance present a challenge to tax advisers. As noted in my recent Tax Journal article (22 February 2024), there still remains some uncertainty on the subject, although tempered by last week’s announcement by the Labour Party that they will not now reinstate the LTA if elected. We have many clients reviewing their pension options as they approach retirement and advice has to be a careful balance between the tax rules now and what they might become even in the relative short term.
Has a recent tax case caught your eye?
The relatively recent case of Allam v HMRC [2021] has certainly been the cause of discussion over the last year. The case is primarily known as a BADR case, but it also has application for transactions in securities. The Upper Tribunal concluded that despite the facts being similar to Cleary (a 1968 case concluding that selling shares in a company to another company you own for cash was subject to a TIS counteraction), the specific facts in Allam demonstrated that obtaining the income tax advantage was not a main purpose, so a TIS counteraction could not be raised. I have seen an increasing number of such cases cross my desk of late.
What are clients currently asking about?
With fewer third-party deals going on at the moment, corporate clients are still looking at ‘internal’ transactions, which are led by business needs or that of their stakeholders. The number of partitioning demergers is particularly high, as are shareholder exits and group rationalisations.
Finally, you might not know this about me but...
I am a mental health first aider and part of BDO’s wellbeing network. I became involved after my own battle with mental illness and that of my immediate family, paying forward the support I received from friends and family. I spent five years working with TaxAid to provide tax advice to the vulnerable, and I will forever be grateful for the support they gave me and the fact they enabled me to continue to ply my trade during some difficult years and for such a worthwhile purpose.
On a lighter note, the family myth is that we are descended from Captain Morgan (the pirate and governor of Jamaica, not the maker of rum), and we have an English bull terrier called Isla who occasionally likes to interrupt my video calls.
With my day job, on the BDO Taxline I deal with a variety of tax questions from our accountant, lawyer and tax professional clients on all areas of tax. The questions are certainly getting more complex and providing the answers is certainly technically challenging.
Otherwise, as a tax technician, I also assist the wider firm with transactions and pension related projects.
If you could make one change to a tax law or practice, what would it be?
Being the firm’s demergers champion, the single change that would make my life easier would be the alignment of the various tax de-grouping provisions, i.e. for capital gains, corporate intangibles and SDLT. The rules for each are similar but all quite different in places, and I have witnessed a few horror stories and near misses. If the rules were all identical, the complexity of demergers would be greatly simplified and associated tax risk reduced.
What do you know now that you wish you’d known at the start of your career?
Advice that I have actually given my sons, one of whom is recently qualified, is to fully engage with the appraisal system. When I started in my career 33 years ago, things were very informal and my attitude was to sit back and expect ‘my brilliance’ to be recognised, which rarely happened. With the development of formal appraisal procedures, we can be much more in charge of our own careers and development. Understanding the system and ‘selling yourself’ is as important today as it ever was.
Are there any new rules that are causing a particular problem in practice?
Leading the pensions tax advisory team, the recently enacted pension rules for the abolition of the lifetime allowance present a challenge to tax advisers. As noted in my recent Tax Journal article (22 February 2024), there still remains some uncertainty on the subject, although tempered by last week’s announcement by the Labour Party that they will not now reinstate the LTA if elected. We have many clients reviewing their pension options as they approach retirement and advice has to be a careful balance between the tax rules now and what they might become even in the relative short term.
Has a recent tax case caught your eye?
The relatively recent case of Allam v HMRC [2021] has certainly been the cause of discussion over the last year. The case is primarily known as a BADR case, but it also has application for transactions in securities. The Upper Tribunal concluded that despite the facts being similar to Cleary (a 1968 case concluding that selling shares in a company to another company you own for cash was subject to a TIS counteraction), the specific facts in Allam demonstrated that obtaining the income tax advantage was not a main purpose, so a TIS counteraction could not be raised. I have seen an increasing number of such cases cross my desk of late.
What are clients currently asking about?
With fewer third-party deals going on at the moment, corporate clients are still looking at ‘internal’ transactions, which are led by business needs or that of their stakeholders. The number of partitioning demergers is particularly high, as are shareholder exits and group rationalisations.
Finally, you might not know this about me but...
I am a mental health first aider and part of BDO’s wellbeing network. I became involved after my own battle with mental illness and that of my immediate family, paying forward the support I received from friends and family. I spent five years working with TaxAid to provide tax advice to the vulnerable, and I will forever be grateful for the support they gave me and the fact they enabled me to continue to ply my trade during some difficult years and for such a worthwhile purpose.
On a lighter note, the family myth is that we are descended from Captain Morgan (the pirate and governor of Jamaica, not the maker of rum), and we have an English bull terrier called Isla who occasionally likes to interrupt my video calls.
