Hudson Contract Investigate The Cost of Getting it Wrong

Speakers:

Jolyon Maugham QC (Specialist tax barrister)

Video Transcript 

Jolyon Maugham - 

My name is Jolyon Maugham, I’m a specialist tax barrister and I’ve been at the bar for fifteen odd years. I’ve got a successful litigation practice.

The size of sums at stake are quite substantial. If you’re employing 20 workers on site at 500 pounds a week then you’ve got a wage bill of 10,000 a week. Over the course of a year that’s half a million pounds. Your national insurance contribution on that is going to be around 55,000 pounds. That’s a pretty big number for a relatively small contractor.

If you don’t think carefully about how you are going to meet that next bill. If you don’t think carefully about whether you’ve got the next bill then you are putting yourself at risk, in some cases, of insolvency.

Hudson’s has been going for a long, long time now. I think I first advised Hudson in 2001. Shortly before it fought a case in the Royal Yorkshire Yacht Club which was where the general commissioners of Bridlington sat. The general commission being the tax tribunal, we won the case and then in 2004 and if memory serves we fought another case before the special commissioners and then before the high court. We won that case as well. Since then Hudson’s activities have gone unchallenged by HMRC for a period of the best part of a decade.

One of the ways in which business are going to look at addressing the section 44 problem is through sifting their workforce and Hudson has developed a mechanism with the assistance and advice from two QC’s and one of the big four accountants as to how to help you with that sift. Hudson will identify which of your workforce it considers can continue to be paid under self-employed as a regime and which needs to be engaged under PAYE.