UK Govt's IR35 tax regulations stimulate open source dev

[Richard Dale]

Derek

It is intended to put IT contractors like myself out of business, because the
UK govt and Inland Revenue think we are just 'disguised permanent employees'
on a tax fiddle. I must pay myself 95% of my companies revenue, and am not
allowed to retain any money in the company. Over a period of a couple of years
or so any company running under this crippled basis will go bust. This is
certainly undemocratic and probably illegal.

For instance, see this: Paymaster General, Dawn Primarolo, justified IR35 in the
House of Commons recently by claiming that contractors were 'cheating honest tax
payers'.

http://www.shout99.com/news/article.php3?sid=20000319202016

Note this money that I was 'cheating off fellow tax payers' was intended to
fund open source development (eg adding Objective-C support to KDevelop from me
so far).

I would like to have spent a year working for a bank in London from March, and
save enough money to do a year or so of software development at home the
following year. But IR35 prevents me funding software development with
income derived from software consultancy. 

I'm 43 - it's important that I can try to build up a 'software portfolio'
because my CV would generally be just be thrown in the bin (certainly for a
permanent job). 

-- Richard

On Thu, 11 May2000, you wrote: 
> Richard,
>      
>      Can you outline IR35 for those of us who haven't heard of it?
>      (Including me, even tho' I'm in the UK and the software industry 
>      [well, embedded anyway] ? )
>      
>      regards,
>      
>      Derek L.G. Mason
> 
> 
> ______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
> Subject: UK Govt's IR35 tax regulations stimulate open source develop
> Author:  kdevelop at barney.cs.uni-potsdam.de at internet
> Date:    10/05/2000 7:15 PM
> 
> 
> I hope people won't mind this sounding off topic. But in my case I've decided 
> that this tax regulation has made it impossible to work for a client in the UK 
> and invoice them (tricky...) - it would destroy my company! 
>      
> For KDevelop this is an advantage - I now intend to carry on 'doing my best 
> stuff' for open source full time until September. Open source is so 'Socialist' 
> after all - helping each other out to improve things to our mutual advantage. 
> For instance, I particularly enjoyed an email exchange with jbb the other week 
> helping to fix a couple of bugs for KDevelop 1.2. Sweet..
>      
> For UK IT contractors reading this - I am advocating writing useful software as 
> a means of industrial action!
>      
> Regards
> -- Richard
>      
>      
>      
> -- 
> IR35 - a Poll Tax for the 21st century. Withdraw from the UK labour market. 
> Write Open Source software. Work abroad. TINA.