Budget Preview

It’s the budget later today and I worry this could be a very interesting one for small businesses, and not in a good way. There has been a lot of rumour and speculation in the last couple of weeks about two possible contentious areas of tax legislation that could lead to big changes to the tax landscape for  owner managed businesses. First is the reduction in the compulsory vat registration threshold from the current £85,000 to something in the region of £35-40,000, which would bring an estimated 2 million small businesses into the VAT net. The second is the roll out of the IR35 rules currently in place in the public sector into the private sector. I’m really hoping that neither of these predictions come to pass,as they will significantly increase admin and compliance costs for small businesses at at time when they could really do without that, but we’ll find out in a few hours time.