Employment Allowance

If you’re an employer, you are likely to have received a letter from David Cameron telling you about the £2,000 allowance available to employers from 6th April 2014 for the 2014/15 tax year that can be offset against Employer’s National Insurance.  This allowance is also available for 2015/16 as well and has been introduced to support employers with their employment costs which in turn leads to promoting growth in the economy. Happy Days.
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Business Expo 2015 Competition Winner!

We are delighted to be one of ten winners of a stand on Wednesday 4th March 2015 from 8am to 3pm at the Three Counties Showground, Malvern.

Our winning stand’s theme is “Fishing for Success?” and we’ll be inviting attendees to take part in our hook a duck challenge in which they’ll have 45 seconds to hook as many numbered ducks as possible.  Prizes will be awarded for the three highest totals of the day; first prize to be a bottle of champagne and 5 hours management accountancy.

This free event supported by the Hereford and Worcester Chamber of Commerce is a great opportunity for businesses to network, create opportunities and support local businesses.

See you there!

Submitting Your Tax Return On-line

Completing your Self-Assessment Tax Return online requires the same information and financial information as if you were submitting via paper.

The key advantages to submitting on-line (as opposed to via paper) is that you have an additional 3 months to make the submission (31st January as opposed to 31st October), you only need to complete the sections that are relevant for you and submitting online means that the calculations are done for you, automatically.

The online submission will lead you through the process beginning with a welcome which gives a helpful reminder of the paperwork that you may need before your start. You then complete a section about you (name, address, Ni number etc) followed by a section called “Tailor your return” which is a simple series of questions with a yes or no answer which will ensure that you then only complete the sections of the full tax return which are relevant to you.

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Bank Scam Warning – Simple Steps to Protect your Money

Unfortunately hardly a week seems to pass by without some news report of people having fallen victim to bank scammers. It seems hardly credible that despite the publicity around these scams over recent years and the simple steps needed to safeguard the funds in your bank account that these scams are still prevalent and finding some success for the criminals operating them. Yet it seems no-one is immune to this type of fraud and theft as the Solicitors Regulatory Authority has recently issued a warning to the law firms it regulates to be wary of scammers tricking firms into disclosing bank security information over the telephone.

The warning cites four firms that have been targeted this way recently, and which have collectively had £2 million taken from their accounts. The scammers gain the confidence of those they call – known as social engineering – to obtain important information and access account funds. Specifically, they ask for “challenge and response” codes, which are used to authenticate payments and in some cases digital banking log on and password credentials. The SRA Executive Director of Operations, said: “These scammers are very active and convincing. They are highly sophisticated in their approach and therefore very capable of duping many people.”
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News from ILFM AGM 2014

At yesterday’s Annual General Meeting of the Institute of Legal Finance and Management (ILFM), I was re-elected for a further three years to the ILFM’s Executive Council.

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Update to SRA Handbook effective 31st October 2014:

The main legal finance and practice management changes in this latest update are:

1. AR20.2 changes have been made following recent the consultation to increase the limit of residual client balances that firms are permitted to dispose of to a charity without the permission of the SRA has been increased from £50 to £500.
2. Changes have been made to the AR32 to exempt those firm’s whose where all of the client money received during an accounting period is money held or received from the Legal Aid Agency or in the circumstances set out in rule 19.3 from the requirement to obtain an accountant’s report.
3. In addition retaining the existing requirement on all other firms to obtain an accountant’s report if they hold client money but only requiring qualified reports to be delivered to the SRA.
4. Changes to the guidance notes to rule 44 and Appendix 5 update the format of the accountant’s report to remove unnecessary information fields.
5. A consequential amendment has been made to rule 4.2 to reflect the revised definition of regulated activity for MDPs.
6. Changes have been made elsewhere to replace references to the Charities Act 1993 with references to the Charities Act 2011.
7. Regulation 6 of the SRA Keeping of the Roll Regulations 2011 has been amended to provide that an enquiry of solicitors without practising certificates will be made at such times as the SRA considers appropriate instead of annually.