Spot on

Couldn't agree more, why should the vast majority who do pay their taxes subsidise those who don't?
This is also the nub IMV of the "image rights" business. It is a means of avoiding tax (which is totally legal, unlike tax evasion which is not) that the rest of us have to pay on our earnings in the UK.
As has been said earlier if that succeeds where the RFL has failed then I for one don't have an issue with it.
Maybe GH should ask Sir Philip Green (or at least his tax advisors) for help?

Whilst id probably agree with the thrust of your post, to be fair I'd imagine it's the retrospective changing of stance on the issue which is the biggest problem, thereby landing Leeds with a tax bill of £2m. Closing the loopholes for the future is fine by me, retrospectively charging clubs a lot more tax does seem unfair to me.

Without necessarily knowing all the facts it does seem a little unfair to be able to retrospectively claim back tax against a company or individual when they were abiding by the rules at the time of the "offence". To make a comparision, say someone was killed in a car accident with another vehicle that was their own fault, would it be fair to retrospectively convict someone of murder if changed the laws from the ones in force at the time the other person died?

You're dealing with the Inland Revenue here and it can't be over-emphasised just how insular these people are, with a culture where your monthly pay does not have to be earned by selling anything, where your monthly pay is not affected at all by how much income the "business" is earning, they have no comprehension of how the sales/performance/delivery/income/expenditure cycle works other than what they have read in text books.

As far as the Revenue is concerned the process of image rights is wrong and is a tax avoidance scheme, and for as long as it takes for them to prove their case they simply assume that everyone agrees with them and will be putting what they regard as illegally withheld monies aside until some random point in the future, I've had lots of dealings with these people, they do not come from a commerce background, they do not think like you and I.

The only evidence that you need to prove the culture is their discovery last year that they had wrongly calculated millions of PAYE accounts - perhaps the simplest tier of tax collection - their response was to simply demand the "underpayments" from the individuals concerned in the assumption that those people had known all along that they were wrong and must surely have been saving that underpayment in a special account somewhere for all that time.

your lot are a bunch of amateurs ! now,if you want to experience REAL bureaucracy,just take a cross-channel ferry or fight across the English Channel,plough through the french system and you will very quickly wish you were back home dealing with the uk lot ! as for the italians.......................

Agreed, they are the most useless bunch of people (I can't call them professionals) I have ever come across. Your first paragraph completely sums them up. There is something wrong with working in a system where you have no link to the outcome and can keep turning up to accept your paycheck regardless.

I've heard that. A guy I work with is with a French woman, and they tried to get their kids on a duel passport. They've had a nightmare

On the other hand I went on a cycling holiday with our kid years ago, his passport was out of date but we never had to show it in France at all, there was no-one at the dock gates to check them when we arrived and they didn't ask for it when we left

You win some, you lose some I guess, but if you'd have needed it, you'd probably still be filling in the forms

Basic translation...

"We did our job wrong, but you should've known we were doing it wrong, so tough!"

Only at HMRC would such a ridiculous notion of an excuse be entertained.

"I'm sorry Mr. Smith, it would appear that I haven't fixed your car properly despite you paying me to do so. I'm not doing anything about it though because you should've known that the left flux capacitor only connects using a MG47C clip, and I've clearly used an MG47B. You idiot. Now get out of my garage."

Imbecilic on so many levels, primarily... If the general public are supposed (expected) to be so in tune with PAYE tax, why are we paying 70,000 people £20k+ a year to deal with it for them?

Back to the original question.

Does anybody know when this "test case" is due to be heard, and when the results of it will be known?

Are these thing long drawn out affairs or it usually sorted out in a day or so?

don't get me wrong,france IS a great place to live & work (i'm just being made redundant ! but will be entitled to three years dole money as i'm over 50) and to bring up your family - the SS system is brilliant and the healthcare,second to none and the public services are great - it's just that the quicker you understand how to play the bureaucracy game the easier you find it. The rules are stricter than the uk for claiming benfits etc which is good in principle but tricky if you need benefits fairly quickly.BTW we live in an area with a catchment area of about 20,000 people and the police station was actually closed down due to the low crime rate !

Given that there's been 30+ replies to your OP, and nobody has so much as hinted at an answer, I'd go with....

No.

Leeds and the RFL are supposed to be updating all SL clubs very soon (they said early Jan apparently) on the progress to date/time-scales. I have not heard anything yet, but when I do I will post it.

Cheers IA.
Good luck at the meeting tomorrow.

Is there anywhere on line that spectators from other clubs can voice their support?

Didnt Wigan have Orrell RU in their fold some years back? I heard that when a player (sorry, his name slips me at the moment) left Wigan he had two P60's One from Wigan and the other from Orrell RU. I may be wrong but it does seem to ring a bell.

Thanks, I better start thinking about putting my presentation together!



When it comes to the planning inquiry we need to put our efforts into things that will be seen to be of the greatest importance (to the planning inspectorate) or return, and that is local people, and RFN is a local action group not a RL action group (if you know what I mean). However, this might be something SWAG as an RL stadium action group might look at a little further down the line, so I will pass this idea on. Thanks for the support though, it is very much appreciated.

Cheers Duncan, on behalf of the thousands of staff who turn up at various tax offices every day, put in a good shift for a not particularly brilliant salary and are let down on a regular basis by infrastructure and management failings, I'd like to pass on your appreciation and that of everyone else jumping on the bandwagon.

On the point at hand - image rights payments and payments into pension schemes have been used a jolly tax avoidance wheeze for years. HMRC has now decided it's going to challenge whether these are genuine image rights payments or actually disguised salary which should have had PAYE operated on it. If it believes clubs have negligently treated these payments incorrectly, and as a result underpaid their PAYE liability, then it will chase them for backdated PAYE due.

One of the points HMRC has to consider is whether these payments were made in line with "generally accepted practice" at the time, i.e. was it something HMRC had specifically said was alright at the time but has now been made incorrect by changes in legislation. It also needs to consider whether clubs acted - in its opinion - negligently or fraudulently in operating these avoidance measures.

There were a few players dual registered and played with Orrell / Wigan
John Whittle, BJ Mather, Gary Connolly as I recall, there may have been others.

You can blame management and infrastructure all you like, bottom line is that they admit to not having got even the most basic of functions correct over many years, allocating a bog standard person a correct tax code should be up there as item number one on the list of "functions that we perform".

The insular nature of the civil service exhibits itself in many ways - I had a conversation with a friend of my brothers last year about his job function, he is middle management in the DSS, has worked his way around lots of job functions, operates on several staff committees, has even done advisory work for Ministers, he's 52 years old and has worked in the dept since he was 16.

We told him that when he had a job that actually produced "something", when he had to go out on the streets and look for customers like most businesses do, then he could lecture us on how to run a business. He was most indignant at this and insisted that his department actually did produce revenue for the government - absolutely insisted on it.

We failed to see how you could actually charge someone for their benefits so asked him to fill us in on more detail, he explained at great length how his dept had recently done some work for the child tax credits dept and had billed them for the time, hence they had recouped some of the DSS overheads in doing so.

After slapping him across the head a few times we pointed out that the child tax credits dept was part of the civil service too and all he was doing was shuffling the money around and that it wasn't the same thing at all - he couldn't see our argument at all.

Grade One Muppet, will be retiring soon on a very nice pension ...

Andy, sorry if this has touched a nerve. My previous post was based exclusively on my experience of dealing with the HMRC office in Middlesbrough, who have not only proved close to useless when I have tried to deal with them, but have done so with an attitude that matches that described by McF.

If they are not representative of the wider HMRC community then I'm sorry, but I suspect that they are.

Of course there are exceptions to every rule.

There are. I know a sales manager that doesn't lie, BS and use management speak..............................I'll introduce the two of you one day.

Crap generalisation. Whatever your dealings with HMRC I doubt every employee is "insular". As for the wider civil service there's a heck of a lot more to it than DSS and HMRC most of which does a fantastic job for very little recognition.

I have had personal dealings with several departments over the years, I have acted as a supplier to several government and local authority departments over the years and I have worked inside several of those offices on projects with the sort of people I describe, two of my closest friends are also lifetime civil servants.

My "generalisation" is based on twenty seven years worth of experience in dealing with the above, believe me, the 300,000 newly redundant (one of my mates included) civil servants will find it difficult to adjust to life in the real workplace despite the assurances of central government that they will be snapped up with no problems.