There have been many calls for the umbrella sector to be regulated by the government, so we chat to industry expert Crawford Temple to find out his thoughts on the subject.  His answer is very interesting: implement a system similar to financial services which has a track record of success and could achieve the same within the umbrella sector.

We discussed about so many umbrella-related issues that this is actually the first of TWO episodes with Crawford.  Here are some of the key takeaways from part 1:

• The majority of umbrella compliance issues already have legislation in place to prevent them, so better enforcement is clearly needed;
• Regulation similar to that seen in financial services would make accreditors liable for the behaviour of their members, so accreditors would be forced to have real teeth;
• HMRC has vast amounts of information and data that could be used to detect potential tax avoidance schemes for targeted enforcement action;
• Where HMRC has had information about individuals’ tax, e.g. via RTI or self-assessment, there should be a limit of 12 months to take action against that individual for unpaid tax / NICs;
• It should never be possible for individuals to accrue tax debts over many years, this is fundamentally wrong and nothing is being done to tackle scheme promoters.

Resources

The report “The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly” is available here

About Crawford Temple

Crawford has some 25 years experience in the umbrella sector and is owner of Professional Passport, the largest independent assessor of payment intermediary compliance.  He is an expert in compliance and risk management across all sectors of the temporary workers market including contractors, recruitment companies, end clients and providers.

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