Brilliant info RG, thanks!

Like I posted before, I have been told HMRC don't want to do any sort of deal with RL and the RL just want the same deal as the RU. I think trying to treat the two codes of Rugby separately is a huge mistake and of course Leeds case therefore of treating the same company with different rules for different employees a strong one! Football of course should, in theory, get higher percentages allowed.

Maybe HMRC will succeed where the RFLs Federation Trained policy was meant to

A couple of questions.

Do you think any HMRC claims would be retrospective and if so how far can they go back?
Will it be the players they go after and / or the clubs?
Do you think it's a reason we have seen a few players return to Australia?

It will be hard for RL to argue that their players images have the same "value" as an International RU player and it's one of the reasons we need to elevate the status of our International game (and players)

Sorry to be a pain, but I do find it fascinating (morbid sod that I am).

Maybe not the same value in £, but in salary percentage they should be equal

They are retrospective I understand, going back maybe 8 or 10 years (I would have to check with my source). Leeds are rumoured to owe a cool £2m ish if HMRC don't back down.

Yes, tax is effectively owing from overseas players as well as I understand it, but as to whether HMRC will pursue them is another matter... probably not!

I think when it comes to international RL yes and no. In the local market of RL, then RL players enjoy huge 'image' and profile IMO and being an international actual extends that across the whole game. As this is all about overseas players, we are talking about Aussie/NZ players as they come from the NRL in the main, so you could argue that RL players who have played in the NRL and played for Aus/NZ enjoy a huge image in Aus (certainly more than RU players) but it only travels as far as Australasia and the North of England, but RU has more overall international impact!

The answer is HMRC just need to give them both the same deal and move on... but they seem to being a bunch of ignorant pedants!

I think this and the poor exchange rate is probably making a difference yes.

If they are looking at closing the loop-hole now i don't see how they can go back because at the time these deals were done they were all legal and above board.
Of course the future impact on contracts will be felt by the clubs and players etc and i reckon the newcomers to SL will have some sort of clause included to account for this legislation change.

Surely it depends on how the business wants to utilise that image? After all, Leeds aren't trying to market themselves in the South of England - their marketing barely leaves West Yorkshire. As has been inferred earlier, Danny McGuire is much more marketable in Leeds than Hendre Fourie, even though the latter is a full England RU international. The two people are both employed by the same employer yet the (arguably) least valuable of the two is subject to more favourable tax agreements.

I am not sure they are legal or illegal as they have not been tested in court or the law changed, HMRC just want the tax because they think it has been a tax avoidance scam (which it sort of has) and until someone does (take it to court) then that will be that. This is why RU did a deal, I also understand that a deal was done on the retrospective payments and they don't want to do that with RL either! Leeds are not challenging them on the legal issue of the actual issues of tax and image rights, just the current and future deal for image right percentage... well in RL's case... none at all!

Spot on! That is exactly the argument Leeds are going to make to the High Court... if it gets that far!

I still don't see how it can be tagged "Tax Avoidence" unless it was shady and done in brown paper bags in the SS car park.


Either way i hope HMRC get hammered in court they are completely unreasonable when dealing with issues re-sports clubs imo.

This is not the NRL salary cap we are talking about here you know, this is the HMRC, brown bags indeed!



This is getting too deep, even for me, but other people who know these things better say HMRC work to their own warped tax-man logic!

IMO they rightly should be. Its not like the sports clubs are whiter than white, and the number of times the tax man is the last to be paid when they go to the wall

How many times in recent years have they squandered Tax money on Court cases involving Sports Clubs and ended up getting the same knid of settlement/outcome that the Culb in question were originally offering?
We as a club who employ both RU and RL sides have a very good case in terms of the image rights deals and can prove that the RL image rights are bigger here than the RU one yet they are seeking not to do the same deal as the RU have ironed out complete madness and a waste of money.
Half the time if they'd accept a restructered deal/offer they would'nt be losing out when the clubs go to the wall.
Lets see if their as keen to get the "money men" who blatantly avoid Tax payments.

They aren't "the last to be paid" when any club or business is liquidated, they stand in line with the rest of the creditors as per the law of the land and they all share out what is left (if anything), they do not hold preferential creditor status anymore and haven't done for some years.

You'd think that the loss of their preferential status would make them more pro-active in collecting overdue taxes wouldn't you ?

You'd think that they would, for instance, have a collections department that actually collected overdue tax in the same way that all businesses have to collect money owed to them, ie its the most important part of any business is the collection of overdue accounts for without that cash any "normal" business would also go to the wall.

You'd think all that wouldn't you ?

Now just think of how many times you've read of business and sports club failures where several years worth of tax are due to the Revenue, just think of last years debacle where the Revenue promised to concentrate harder on those accounts that were due up to five years ago.

Five years.

Any "normal" business with accounts due from five years ago would deserve to go bust.

The Revenue don't deserve preferential status nor do they work hard enough for "normal" status, when they can't even calculate properly what Joe Bloggs on a fixed salary owes on his PAYE (has anyone got one of those "revised" demands yet ?) then how much more proof do you need that the department is not fit for purpose ?

Hasn't that just recently been changed? I thought I heard on the news lately that the tax man now gets priority?

[url=http://www.insolvency.gov.uk/insolvencyprofessionandlegislation/con_doc_register/con_doc_archive/consultation/condoc/posofcrownaspref.htmOriginal consultation case for removing preferential status[/url, basically was done to introduce "a more commercial attitude" to the tax collection department, (that worked well then didn't it ) preferential status was removed in 2003 and as far as I know is still the case (certainly was last year from personal knowledge

)

Note that document was issued by The Insolvency Service - if you could imagine a government department adrift in a sea of bewildering rules and regulations, rudderless and without sail or mechanical power, the captain fallen overboard and all the crew drunk at their stations - then the Insolvency Service is worse than that.

My personal contact with them these past nine months has convinced me that there is an office in Edinburgh where all of lifes simpletons, barmpots, and blocks of wood are offered jobs with good pensions as long as they sometimes answer the phone and spout random bollacks, even putting their random bollacks in writing on occasion - I wrote to my MP and recommended that if they wanted to look for areas of the civil service to cut first then I had one department in mind that could be erased in its entirety without detrimental effect to anyone except the buffoons who work there.

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