But clearly they aren;t. I have had many a trademan say its £2,000 or if you are paying cash it's £1,600. You would have to be an idiot not to expect that to mean that they are going to account for their tax on what you paid them.
Paying tradesmen cash in hand morally wrong - minister
- Thread starter estebanrey
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But clearly they aren;t. I have had many a trademan say its £2,000 or if you are paying cash it's £1,600. You would have to be an idiot not to expect that to mean that they are going to account for their tax on what you paid them.
So what are peoples views on this scenario then?....
I have a friend who is a self employed builder, pretty much all of his work is carried out on a "cash in hand" basis.
He has an accountant who advises him to put so much of that cash in hand money through the books.
Last year his official through the books money was just under 14k, but after hearing him talk and the lifestyle he leads i suspect his actual income is probably around the 40k per year mark.
His wife claims tax credits etc for the 3 kids because their joint income is regarded as being quite low.
My personal views on this are that it is wrong for them to do what they are doing, he is paying so little if any tax whatsoever, they are leeching off the system and they are taking the **** out of normal tax paying, hard working people.
Thoughts?
I have a friend who is a self employed builder, pretty much all of his work is carried out on a "cash in hand" basis.
He has an accountant who advises him to put so much of that cash in hand money through the books.
Last year his official through the books money was just under 14k, but after hearing him talk and the lifestyle he leads i suspect his actual income is probably around the 40k per year mark.
His wife claims tax credits etc for the 3 kids because their joint income is regarded as being quite low.
My personal views on this are that it is wrong for them to do what they are doing, he is paying so little if any tax whatsoever, they are leeching off the system and they are taking the **** out of normal tax paying, hard working people.
Thoughts?
Yeah, just look at how many posts there are on here about advice avoiding import duty and vat when buying from abroad.............
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I'm surprised he hasn't been found out to be honest. If I worked for the Inland Revenue and a self employed builder was claiming he was earning £14k a year I'd be all over it.
His accountant doesn't sound too bright either either. a few thousand is one thing but to claim you earn probably less than half of what you do is just stupid.
Soldato
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Err....go where?
Whatchya mean?
Anyway, my issue is that if the mrs has mentioned at work that we are having a conservatory some miserable so and so may just 'enquire' about it....
I know exactly what they are doing and why, but that's their business not mine. I just want my plastering done.
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It still makes you complicit. It's like buying stolen goods you know have come off the back of a lorry and saying "well I didn't steal it", it doesn't hold water with the Police though.
Yet you miss the whole point of my post?
You appear to have the same lack of awareness as that politician, but thank you for clarifying the tax position of one particular job.
No, you provided a very poor example. I see where you are coming from but that is the whole point of the tax free limit. If you had said full time cleaners then I wouldn't have picked you up on the point (and living on £12 isn't particularly difficult - says the person who lived off at max £7k a year for 5 years).
What you seem to be suggesting either way however is that it's ok to break the law as long as you are poor? It's less wrong than a "rich" person not breaking the law?
To be fair, while an appeal to emotion does exist - the argument wasn't an appeal to emotion.
Groen clearly stated "taxation is immoral" without qualifying any other conditions in which it is (blanket statement).
To counter that using an example of disabled children is perfect viable (as they would be included in the "immoral" statement above).
While it's emotive, it's still valid & not a fallacy (as it's a perfectly logical counter to the "taxation is immoral" - more-so when the subject of morality is mentioned (as morality is subjective) the whole concept of logical fallacies is meaningless on this issue.
Anyway, back to the subject.
My main point would be that people complicit in tax evasion lose the right to complain about benefit fraudsters (or people claiming legally).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complicity
"An individual is complicit in a crime if he/she is aware of its occurrence and has the ability to report the crime, but fails to do so. As such, the individual effectively allows criminals to carry out a crime despite possibly being able to stop them, either directly or by contacting the authorities, thus making the individual a de-facto accessory to the crime rather than an innocent bystander."
Groen clearly stated "taxation is immoral" without qualifying any other conditions in which it is (blanket statement).
To counter that using an example of disabled children is perfect viable (as they would be included in the "immoral" statement above).
While it's emotive, it's still valid & not a fallacy (as it's a perfectly logical counter to the "taxation is immoral" - more-so when the subject of morality is mentioned (as morality is subjective) the whole concept of logical fallacies is meaningless on this issue.
Anyway, back to the subject.
My main point would be that people complicit in tax evasion lose the right to complain about benefit fraudsters (or people claiming legally).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complicity
"An individual is complicit in a crime if he/she is aware of its occurrence and has the ability to report the crime, but fails to do so. As such, the individual effectively allows criminals to carry out a crime despite possibly being able to stop them, either directly or by contacting the authorities, thus making the individual a de-facto accessory to the crime rather than an innocent bystander."
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Soldato
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Aren't people taking this out of context? He was talking specifically about the 'Ok, how much if I pay cash wink wink?' cash-in-hand payments.
I'm pretty sure the police aren't going to come knocking at my door because I paid my builder cash in hand rather than wrote a cheque.
.And it's not even that simple, one is illegal and the other isn't...
Many people use the legal way of avoiding tax anyway (for example charitable donations) so it just stinks of hypocracy...
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Whenever I watch Bargain Hunt I wonder how many of those antique stall holders are dodging tax given what they sell has no easily defined value. Sell it for £200, claim you sold it for £100 and who's to know?
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I'm pretty sure the police aren't going to come knocking at my door because I paid my builder cash in hand rather than wrote a cheque.
That wasn't the point I was making clearly. The point was about deferred responsibility.
Yes they are, people seem to be mistaking paying by cash (as a form of payment) for a legitimate service with "Cash-in-hand" by which both parties deliberately use cash as a method of avoiding pay tax for the worker & getting a discount as a customer.
The former is just a payment method, the latter is being complicit in illegal tax evasion.
Stop talking like bhavv, you are scaring me
My point was never about whether cleaners pay massive amounts of tax or not, but let's assume one of them does, name89 suggested that we chase this person to pay tax owed as a moral duty (paraphrasing)
I disagreed.
then you jump in and start talking about how no cleaner pays tax like this was somehow relevant? Yes it is partly true, have an Internet cookie, it's just not what I was talking about and it makes no difference to my point - chasing low paid workers is not some kind of moral crusade, it is the opposite when you have flagrant evasion by that same ministers friends.
Where is the limit then?
Someone that earns £10k? 26k? £50k? £1m?
There is a reason the tax free allowance is there. There is an argument for increasing it (and I'm all for that - minimum wage at 40 hours a week would be a good figure) but suggesting some people should be allowed to evade tax while others shouldn't is wrong.
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My brother is a tradesman, does roofing and guttering. Invoices for the full amount including accounting for tax and vat etc, how many jobs does he lose because of that. The list is endless. Specially in a time when foreign workers charge next to nothing for the same work, do they pay tax.. Do they ****
If he did as others do he would be busy 7 days a week with work.
If he did as others do he would be busy 7 days a week with work.
No it doesn't.
You are only complicit if there is an explicit understanding that the saving is passed on to you as a portion of the taxes he will potentially avoid. For example, the tradesman gives you a discount equal to the VAT and he tells you that the discount is dependent on his not paying the required taxes. There are other savings to be had from cash payments, such as bank charges and the ability of the tradesman to use cash to fund savings on materias etc.....which could account for such savings.
It is not at all like knowingly recieving stolen goods.
Totally agree, a higher tax free allowance (set at a living wage, with higher overall tax rates to compensate) would be a good start.
So I'll pay a bit more tax, some things are worth paying for.