Friday, March 14, 2008

A tale of 2 expense claims

While our MP's lord it over us with their claims for kitchen's, mirrors, carpets and other essential goods they need to be able to carry out their business effectively (more on this later) we have just been zapped by HMRC for our lax mobile phone policy.

We are a smallish company, c.60 employees, and because our life is perilous (we could be closed down quickly if some trials fail) we have allowed employees to use their own mobile phones. We have paid for calls and pro-rata for subscription/free calls. At most this tend to be around £20 per month for employees who use their phones a lot.

This is good enough for the taxman, they have a benefit-in-kind and told us to stop. We may even be getting a bill to pay unpaid taxes on this benefit going back 3 years.

We now have to go out and get a mobile phone contract for all our employees and give them phones. As well as the administrative cost we will have to take out a year's contract despite the fact we may not be in business in 12 months, so this is another liability our, foreign, shareholders will have to carry.

We really have to get these bastards at Westminster out of their ivory towers and in to the real world, or, if they carry n like this on to the end of a piece of rope hanging from the nearest lamppost.

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