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Bankers dodging windfall tax … 
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Joined: Fri Apr 24, 2009 9:44 pm
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The City is scared that Mr Darling will use today’s Pre-Budget Report to announce such a one-off levy. And high earners have rushed to make contingency plans with their employers, lawyers and accountants. Schemes to reduce a heavy tax bill include:

• increasing a banker’s basic salary in return for reducing the bonus element of their pay;

• beefing up benefits, which could include paying school fees;

• reclassifying a banker as a “consultant” thereby making him or her a self-employed businessman and escaping a banker tax;

• reclassifying a banker as being based in another country — quickly;

• splitting off trading desks and turning them into mini hedge funds so that those involved are no longer bankers but hedge fund managers.

It is believed that one Asian bank operating in the City has already implemented a plan where new bankers have been allocated at least two years’ worth of bonuses in the past few weeks, so they effectively squeeze under the wire of anything Mr Darling announces today.

One source said: “This is why a bonus tax is such a daft idea. Regardless of morality, such a tax would be totally ineffective because bankers will find endless ways of avoiding it.”


http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/b ... 949460.ece

bankers you just gotta luv 'em …

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Wed Dec 09, 2009 4:44 am
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The problem here is that the bankers are smarter than the politicians.
And they're both just as greedy as each other. :evil:

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Wed Dec 09, 2009 11:29 am
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This won't solve anything. Bankers' bonuses are small fry compared to how much the government has pissed away. Reigning in bonuses should have been a condition of the government bailout.

Scrap the National Identity Register, the countless other databases that remove our privacy and Trident. Billions will be saved right there.

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Wed Dec 09, 2009 12:33 pm
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"Regardless of morality"

Couldn't have put it better myself...

Surely most of those side steps simply won't work. if they pay the bonuses as salary they'll still pay a bunch of tax on them (I assume they'll be in the 50% tax bracket anyway). If they say they're non-dom then they have to prove it, which means they'll effectively have to become non-dom. If they are classified as consultants they'll find they're hit by IR-35 and the like. And do they really think the law is going to bother discriminating between 'investment banker' and 'hedge fund manager'? More than likely it will just say 'anyone who works for a bank or a subsidiary of a bank' and you have to be registered in a certain way to trade as a bank, so that is easy to define.

I'm sure there will be ways to get around any law that they bring in, but I suspect they'll have to be a whole lot more sophisticated than the suggestions made above. They rather smack to me of a bit of spin to suggest it's all not worth doing...

Jon


Wed Dec 09, 2009 5:34 pm
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