I'd imagine Ant & Dec would be harder to tap as A) They have enough money for the best lawyers in the land, and B) they have a production company which makes content for ITV.
As Brekkie says, I'm surprised Lorraine hasn't wound up producing her own show.
There may be some tax benefits - there are of course incentives to encourage entrepreneurship - but it's no free lunch to be self employed (as I know all too well).
Come on, she's been there for 30 years. That job is pretty secure.
These "Limited Companies" are nothing more than smoke & mirror tax avoidence schemes. S'all good man.
There may be some tax benefits - there are of course incentives to encourage entrepreneurship - but it's no free lunch to be self employed (as I know all too well).
Come on, she's been there for 30 years. That job is pretty secure.
There may be some tax benefits - there are of course incentives to encourage entrepreneurship - but it's no free lunch to be self employed (as I know all too well).
Come on, she's been there for 30 years. That job is pretty secure.
Where did I mention job security?
I assumed it's what you meant by "no free lunch". If not I'd love to know what other hardships poor self employed Lorraine faces in the same very well paid job she's had for 30 years.
The real story is how much of a mess the law is when it comes to this. HMRC are using a 20 year old law in order to try scrape some more cash off a celebrity with whom they've previously had no problem. There's no consistency.
If there were clearer definitions of self-employment and employment, it wouldn't be an issue.
It's very easy to throw your hands up in the air and say "it's clearly tax avoidance", but that's an ill informed stance. If anything, it's companies like ITV that stand to benefit more from presenters being self employed than the presenters themselves.
I'd imagine Ant & Dec would be harder to tap as A) They have enough money for the best lawyers in the land, and B) they have a production company which makes content for ITV.
As Brekkie says, I'm surprised Lorraine hasn't wound up producing her own show.
I imagine ITV would be reluctant to allow their talent to produce their daytime lineup. The ITV daytime lineup apart from a handful of shows is in house productions.
It's pretty easy to find out if a presenter has a limited company since they have to register with Companies House. Googling Holly and Phil for example, both have limited companies although Holly is registered under her married name. Phil has one limited company named after Gordon the Gopher!
Last edited by Jonwo on 21 March 2019 1:41am - 2 times in total
If her company was already paying the relevant corporation tax and making the necessary tax and national insurance deductions from her salary, then why would HMRC be chasing an extra £1.2 million in tax/national insurance?
Something doesn't seem right here.
Do you get taxed on dividends? Maybe the idea is that you get paid the bare minimum salary and then take the profits?
These sort of things aren't all dodgy. I've known freelance colleagues who have limited companies because they work for multiple companies but the work is inconsistent. It allows them to have a regular salary evening up the bumps, which of course they pay income tax and NI on
Having looked at her company accounts, Lorraine has been freelance since she joined GMTV in 1992.
She originally hosted the indie produced Top of the Morning rather than the main GMTV programme itself, so perhaps going freelance was a necessity at the time. She fell into the main presenter role after GMTV went tits up. (Her freelance status explains how GMTV managed to drop her so easily during her maternity leave and replace her with Anthea Turner)
It seems a perfectly reasonable operation, a single limited company to handle her revenue from multiple sources and is all declared properly. There are no other companies siphoning money away. Her accounts have always been kept in perfect order and the company pays around £300,000 in taxes each year.
If her company was already paying the relevant corporation tax and making the necessary tax and national insurance deductions from her salary, then why would HMRC be chasing an extra £1.2 million in tax/national insurance?
Something doesn't seem right here.
Do you get taxed on dividends? Maybe the idea is that you get paid the bare minimum salary and then take the profits?
These sort of things aren't all dodgy. I've known freelance colleagues who have limited companies because they work for multiple companies but the work is inconsistent. It allows them to have a regular salary evening up the bumps, which of course they pay income tax and NI on
That's what I do, and my wife is company secretary who holds 50% of the 'shares', so she also can draw dividends. I then take a small salary that is just below the PAYE tax threshold.
However in the last couple of years the level of tax free dividends has been reduced significantly, so
you're forced either to take more 'PAYE' salary, or pay the tax on dividend payments. I'm in the process
now of calculating the balance of salary against dividends for the new tax year that I should draw, but very
broadly HMRC are clearly aiming to make 'one person' limited companies no more 'advantageous' than straightforward PAYE employment.
