Tax evasion is governments’ pet hate at the minute with the ‘self-employed’ truck driver firmly in their sights, might joint-liability for the self-employed trucker and contractor who don’t pay what they owe make people think twice? For more than two decades Tony drove trucks for an array of local hauliers. He toured the UK, and made one trip to the Republic of Ireland that he always mentioned, in the name of haulage.
Yet trucking was not his day job. His day job was a milk round. Six days a week, four am to noon, he’d be out there delivering pints door-to-door and collecting the empties. Tony had come off the road when his marriage hit the rocks. When it turned out Tony was the couple’s problem, and not him being away all week, he decided to go back on the road as a casual bachelor. Each week he’d earn a little extra behind the wheel of a tipper doing the graveyard shift from the asphalt plant, or trunking up the road to do a change over, or nipping to the port to collect a trailer. He was your man for a crisis. During his time as a casual Tony drove for logistic behemoths, family-run hauliers and one-man-bands. Not once did he declare the extra earnings, it was all cash on hand. Tighter than two coats of paint, our guess was that the extra money went on more mattresses to store his ill-gotten gains. Last year The Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices – led by Matthew Taylor, the Royal Society of Arts chief executive – was published. It assessed how laws that surround the ‘gig economy’ can be tightened up and tax avoidance reduced. Gig economy is a fashionable term for companies using temporary staff where the money paid for services rendered can be ‘masked’ or hidden or simply not declared by the payer and/or payee. To counter it Taylor suggested major companies should be jointly liable for not complying with employment regulation uncovered in their respective supply chains. In other words follow the paper trail from the bottom up to the top. Taylor cited an example of a road haulage company run by a couple of ‘cowboys’ (yes, he said cowboys) that had encouraged its drivers to be self-employed. When the company went bust the cowboys rode off into the sunset with the money. The drivers lost their jobs and when HMRC started digging around the unfortunate drivers were also perused for unpaid taxes. The argument, as seen by Taylor, is about who really benefits. Joint liability would mean companies at the top of that tree would make sure tax avoidance in the supply chain was eradicated, or else. More tax avoiders are appearing in court receiving fines and in some cases jail time as well. However, Taylor fears the courts are doing too much sentencing while legislation isn’t doing enough decreeing. Rather than eradicate self-employment legislation government needs to tighten it up. If one haulier pays their drivers a good wage, pays its taxes and NI contributions but struggles to compete with another hauler who uses the system to avoid adhering to workers’ rights and paying business taxes, then legislation should be used to create a level playing field. So, what makes someone self-employed? Among several endless lists of definitions the ones that denote a driver as ‘self-employed’ might include deciding what work they do and when, using their own money to buy business assets, cover running costs and provide tools and equipment for their work, can work for more than one client, submit invoices for the work they’ve done, are responsible for paying their own tax and NI, and don’t get holiday or sick pay when they’re not working. In the main Tony met many of those criteria but the official tax records will show he spent 48 hours a week handling milk. The problem is that HMRC doesn’t have the scope to track down every offender, where I live there are just six HMRC inspectors and more than 20,000 businesses. Getting caught is tantamount to being a needle in the haystack. Besides, the rules are applied retrospectively. If Tony had an accident, or was waved in by DVSA, a little snooping would have revealed that Tony was a casual employee. Then the house of cards might well have collapsed. In the end Tony was only ever collared by his ex-wife. His charmed life ended in his late 60s. After the funeral we adjourned to the pub to raise a pint to remember Tony. As we did one of his closest friends summed his life up succinctly; “There were two certainties in life, death and taxes, but Tony had to be different.”
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AuthorAging proletariat with face, teeth and body to prove it. Archives
August 2021
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