{"id":9571,"date":"2023-05-06T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-05-06T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.taxpolicy.org.uk\/?p=9571"},"modified":"2023-09-11T22:03:07","modified_gmt":"2023-09-11T21:03:07","slug":"schoolfees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/heacham.neidles.com\/2023\/05\/06\/schoolfees\/","title":{"rendered":"The SNP’s new auditors are flogging a dodgy tax avoidance scheme, and may face a \u00a31m HMRC penalty"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Scottish National Party just appointed<\/a> AMS Accounting as their auditors. AMS have a tax boutique, Signature, as part of their corporate group, <\/a>providing “education and school fees planning”<\/a>. This “planning” turns out to be a tax avoidance scheme for parents paying school fees.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Signature<\/em><\/strong>‘s marketing suggests a “huge annual saving”, and we reckon a family with three children could avoid \u00a360k of tax per year. However, we\u2019ve analysed the scheme, and believe it to be technically hopeless – HMRC will inevitably challenge it, and likely win, leaving Signature’s clients in a disastrous tax position.<\/em><\/strong> Worse still, Signature appears to have unlawfully failed to disclose the scheme to HMRC, which could trigger a \u00a31m penalty<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This short report summarises the Signature scheme, how it’s supposed to work, why it fails, and the wider implications.<\/em><\/strong> The Guardian is covering the story here.<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

FURTHER UPDATE: HMRC have published a “Spotlight”<\/a> confirming that they believe these schemes don’t work. Hopefully that’s the end of them.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

UPDATE: <\/strong>I’m hearing that the scheme is being widely promoted. One such promoter, Fortus, took down the relevant page<\/a> off their website earlier today, but left a copy of their webinar, which we have archived here<\/a>1<\/a><\/sup>(c) Fortus, but there is an obvious public interest and fair dealing justification in making a copy publicly available<\/span>, with some nice slides demonstrating what looks like exactly the same structure: <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\t