So now, as is usual, the truth begins to creep out
Firstly, you clearly do not have the knowledge of insolvency even if you have of debt recovery
Insolvency was created to allow second chances and precisely to avoid debtors prison unless there was clear fraud
No on has in the case you allude to suggested fraud that I know of
It should have been dealt with formally as insolvency and not informally as it was
But formal insolvency very, very rarely results in blame being apportioned let alone prison even though much is tax driven
Sop you are a) wrong b) making false claims c) likely to be misrepresenting facts
And so I make clear there are no cases where debt should not be chased – except for the billions of pounds HMRC decide not to chase for their own reasons to which you or I are not privy
All I ask in those cases has always been explanation as to why: it is not forthcoming
You have now had a full answer
Please do not waste my time again
This is about Ms. Batmanandrobin and her charity collecting PAYE from staff wages and then not paying it. HMRC agreed to write off £500k.
Ritchie is, of course, the man who wails that HMRC doesn’t chase tax debts. But apparently that’s fine if it involves Ms. Batmanandrobin.
And if only he knew who he was arguing with in that comment. Someone with detailed and extensive professional knowledge of how tax debt recovery actually works at HMRC….
“No on has in the case you allude to suggested fraud”
Half a million of employee tax collected but not paid. If this had been a private sector business then he would be crying fraud, and quite rightly. At the very, very least it’s massive incompetence by the charity and everyone involved should be dismissed. FruitHead shouldn’t get a free pass because, well, “she’s one of us”.
Out of interest, what is the position of the employees in situations like this? Could they be liable for the tax due by them that was not paid?
Not an expert but I think the reason that HMRC is a preferential creditor is so that they can recover as much tax as possible. I imagine that the law will say that the company has deducted tax and that there is no recourse back to the employee if it is not handed over. But given the way that tax law has been “amended” in the last 18 years, I would not hold my breath. Osborne is just as wicked as Brown and co.
Are they insolvent?
It appears that HMRC will only chase the employee if the tax hasn’t been correctly deducted.
http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/manuals/dmbmanual/dmbm570250.htm
Seems unusually lenient of them.
Tim
Given it has taken his surreptitious looking at this blog (which we know he does) and the actions of the stool pigeon Arnald to expose Lavrentiy Beria and other Communist alumni how is he going to expose people with real knowledge.
Time and again he is exposed as a complete ignoramus on almost every topic you care to name. The fact ANYONE can consider him an authority on anything tells us much about the issues affecting the UK.
One of the nastiest, most thuggish commentators in Britain – a really vicious piece of work.
If the employee has actually suffered the PAYE and NI, so has only received the net amount, then HMRC won’t chase them.
They will do if, for example, they got an untaxed benefit and the PAYE/NI in question is a grossing-up amount, as that means that the tax hasn’t been suffered anywhere.
They can go after directors in some circumstances, mostly to do with fraud or neglect; I’m not sure how that applies to charities. If the management of the charity are analogous to directors, and have neglected their duties, it may well be possible – but I’d have to check.
He really is a hypocritical twat.
In one of his petulant rants about welfare reform he says that you can’t justify it by saying that’s what the people voted for. So I pointed out that a few days ago he was ranting on about how politicians were letting down the Greek people over what they had voted for so it seemed to me that the people only counted when they agreed with him. He deleted the post. A few posts after he’s ranting on about the importance to democracy of dissent.
Utter, utter, utter hypocritical twat.
re Mrs Batmaniouysdofhniluvfy6asgfe8l
How it can’t be at the very least neglect to deduct tax/NI from employees wages and then knowingly go spend it all on something else instead of handing it over to the taxman, God alone knows.
Again, hypocritical twatishness from Murphy.
Funnily enough, it is fraud.
The trustees deducted took money from the employees and promised to pay their tax liability to HMRC.
They decided to keep the money instead.
To me this sounds like a deliberate deception to make an unlawful gain.
Which, funnily enough is the definition of fraud.
Ritchie is a deliberately ignorant twat.
“Insolvency was created to allow second chances and precisely to avoid debtors prison unless there was clear fraud”
This may well be true to a large degree for individual insolvency. Has he not noticed, however, that HMRC can and does issue winding-up petitions on companies? The point being that corporate insolvencies are, or should be, geared towards realising the assets for creditors; not to give the company directors a ‘second chance’.
“But formal insolvency very, very rarely results in blame being apportioned let alone prison even though much is tax driven”
For corporate insovencies that is just plain bollocks. The directors always have questions to answer and actions to account for.
PAYE which is deducted or deemed to be deducted is held in trust by the employer: s 167 TAA 1994.
There are multiple crimes committed when deductions are not remitted, from ordinary theft and breach of trust, through the statutory offence in s 143A (1) TAA 1994, which a person commits if he or she “knowingly applies or permits the application of the amount of a deduction or withholding of tax made or deemed made under a tax law for any purpose other than in payment to the CIR”
It isn’t fraud, though it’s as bad or worse.
That’s what I love about this blog: we all know Murphy’s a twat, but there is a sufficiently diverse assortment of specialist knowledge in the commentariat that his twattishness can be precisely enumerated in statute law.
Latest gem from Ritchie:
“If instead the tax was waived then that would be a grant and there is no issue to discuss”
So, an organisation withholds tax from its employees’ salaries and then secretly lobbies the government to waive its legal obligation to pay it over to the Treasury. It gets this secret waiver and Richard Murphy says “there is no issue to discuss”
So this is how the Courageous State works in practice.
‘Twas always thus. The Courageous State was always going to be, and has been always, a foetid swamp of corruption and power. The amazing thing is that they always seem to get to start again from a position of trust each time they fail.
Hey, Arnald
Tell your pal that while paranoia is a survival traitr, stupidity is not. The comment I posted while browsing TRUK in an ubsuccessful search for the article mentioned above was gently helpful and he could have actioned my suggestion without acknowledging it and thereby admitting that he was wrong.
Where? Where? Has he pulled this blogpost?
@ TMB
No, just my helpful comment on TRUK.
Apparently Shelter thinks that NO two-child family can afford to live in a two-bedroom house in 57.9% of somewhere (scruffy map of most of England, probably excluding Scotland and Wales).
Strangely we can afford to live in one of the unaffordable areas – maybe he thinks we could no longer do so if we down-sized to a two-bedroom house.
It’s very simple if you apply Ritchie logic.
There’s no such thing as taxpayer’s money, it was the government’s money, even before it was earned. And since the employees had the government’s money, it was just Ritchie-approved government spending to give it given to Mrs. BachmanTurnerOverdrive.
John 77
thanks for the help. Had a quick look but like so much of his writing and that of his acolytes and neophytes, trying to read it is like stirring treacle with your eyelashes.
Rob
As always – spot on! Arguably the closest thing in the world today to Murphy’s vision of a Courageous State is North Korea – apparently corruption, bribery and nepotism are endemic at all levels of society and people will risk the imprisonment of their entire family and swim a 30 mile river to escape. That is his vision – and the kids company affair is a perfect example of how Orwellian it would be in practice – ‘some are equal, but some are more equal than others’
One of the most dangerous men in Britain, if not the world.
Just because there is a statutory offence under a Taxation Act, doesn’t mean that it isn’t also an offence under the Fraud Act (s4?).
And, just to be a pendant, TAA94? I can’t find a UK 1994 Taxation Act other than the VAT one on line?
Kids Company seems to have been as well audited as Toshiba.
Alan Yentob admits that mistakes were made at Kids Company
“children self-refer and our policy has been that no child should be turned away.”
Weren’t there reports that they were just handing out money to children that turned up?
“There was no financial mismanagement”.
Well just great then. So they withheld tax from their employees and CHOSE not to remit it? Or did they just look at the gross salaries/wages, realise they couldn’t afford to pay them and just say “No problem. Because we aren’t going to hand over the tax anyway”.
Either way “no financial mismanagement” when you don’t pay your tax bill suggests you have decided to commit tax fraud.
Anyway I don’t think I shall write to him as Dave Trueman again. He said harsh things about me and hurt my feelings. I need therapy, something like wandering to one of those mug charities that hands you cash if you put up a bit of a hard luck story.
Request for clarification:
“Insolvency was created to allow second chances and precisely to avoid debtors prison unless there was clear fraud”
Is he talking about Administration rather than insolvency here?
diogenes
Clarification: he was rambling around and doesn’t know what he is talking about.
I have over the years heard this little missive about ‘second chances’ a couple of times before, both from accountants of people who liked to run up debts and then leave their creditors singing for the money. So I have no doubt that is what a.couple of Ritchie’s clients used to do, with his help! I have never heard it before in a corporate or organisational context.