Tax First March: News, events and change in tax

 

Our Tax First newsletter provides tax professionals with a round-up of the past month's major financial news and a calendar of useful diary dates.

 

The Chancellor, George Osborne, will be revealing his Budget on 23 March 2011. For all our latest predictions and insight into what the famous red case may contain, you can visit the PwC Budget website. We’ll bring you a full round-up of the major tax announcements next month in the April issue of Tax First.

 

We start this edition with news from the banking sector. The Chancellor recently increased the rate of the bank levy to be charged in 2011 to an average rate for the year of 0.075% - this will have a serious impact for banks.

 

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has been examining how the exchange of information between international tax jurisdictions could work in the future. We look into the background to the work, its current status and possible future developments in this area.

 

If you run a defined benefit (DB) pension scheme, then we have details of new legislation that may affect your scheme. The ‘scheme pays’ legislation makes it easier for individuals to pay tax, but may also mean that DB schemes have to meet some of the tax bill.

 

Still on the theme of pensions, we highlight the Wheels Common Investment Fund and the National Association of Pension Funds (Wheels) test case. This case focuses on whether the management of occupational pension funds is exempt from VAT. You may want to think about whether all claims have been made to recover VAT charged on your management services.

 

Lastly, we highlight the release of our Total Tax Contribution (TTC) survey - a well understood and accepted approach for companies to measure all of the taxes that they pay. You can find the survey results at www.pwc.co.uk/ttc.