Today we received an email from HMRC. Specifically, an email agreeing a valuation of a company for an Enterprise Management Incentive ("EMI")scheme. What’s the big deal? For decades, agreeing valuations with HMRC for employee share schemes has been a grind of hand written forms, heaps...
If you’re running an employee share scheme, it’s obvious that it extends to employees. However, is it always obvious who your employees actually are? If you’re using a tax advantaged share scheme, like the Enterprise Management Incentive Scheme (EMI) or Company Share Option Plan (CSOP), you...
If you’re running a share plan for employees, you must submit your annual share scheme return on HMRC’s online system by 6 July 2018. If you don’t, fines will likely apply.HMRC are not known for accepting excuses for late filing. Here are some...
As we approach the end of the tax year, our Operations Team starts to think about the share plan annual returns that we will prepare and submit for our clients. Since April 2014 HMRC has required all reportable share schemes to be registered online under Employment...
The Court of Appeal has recently overturned a decision by the Employment Appeal Tribunal on age discrimination regarding an employee share plan. The new decision highlights that it may be appropriate for employers to discriminate based on age, but only in certain circumstances. Some share...
Dealing with share plan returns sounds pretty unexciting – until you get a penalty for not doing it properly. We recently did a review of companies that took some or all of their plan administration in house or to a non-specialist on cost grounds: 92.5% of...
The Chancellor recently answered an online question, regarding the tax ad, which represents the employee ownership industry, found that employees found the five-year holding period for the Share Incentive Plan (SIP) to be too long before being able to sell shares tax free and it...
We recently published an outline checklist for putting in place an employee share plan. Step one on that checklist is producing a blueprint for the design of the employee share plan. This is important not just to get the design of the employee share plan right...
The default tax position for employees acquiring shares in their employer is a charge to income tax. This surprises some employers who think that shares must be capital assets and therefore taxed more favourably than cash no matter how the shares are delivered to staff. RM2...
Administering a Share Incentive Plan (SIP) is easy, isn’t it? It can be done in house, can’t it? Like most things, the answer is yes, but only if you know what you are doing! A client recently asked us to help remedy some issues they had...
This month, John Lewis Partnership celebrated spring by announcing celebrations for its 150th anniversary. Happy birthday to the biggest UK co-owned business! For many people, John Lewis is the poster boy of employee ownership in the UK, with the business owned in trust on behalf of...
