Hello. My name is Dermot Callanan, and I lead the private client practice here in the UK.
Our award winning private client team helps individuals, trustees, entrepreneurs and family businesses and partnerships with creative and constructive tax advice. Whether it’s the preparation of a tax return, managing a complex transaction, handling wealth management or transferring wealth down to the next generation, we can help. We provide clear advice, tangible results and a transparent fee.
In order to inform our clients and to show potential new clients what we can do, we publish a magazine called Personal Perspectives, and I’m pleased to introduce you to the third edition of that magazine today. Personal Perspectives is aimed to inform you about contemporary issues as they affect our clients.
At the time of publishing this, our third edition, the government is consulting widely about a number of proposed changes to the law, in particular a new statutory residents test which will affect anybody either coming to the UK to live here, or going to live abroad outside the UK. Secondly in relation to non domiciled individuals, proposals to relax the laws to enable them remit money to the UK without paying tax, if it’s for the purposes of specific investment. Finally an extension of tax relief for charitable giving and for Venture Capital Investment.
Another very important current issue for our clients is the renewed focus of HMRC on the top tax payers in the country. This was illustrated by the announcement made by Danny Alexander at the recent Liberal Democrat Party Conference, where he stated the government’s intention to recruit up to a further two thousand, either through recruitment or redeployment, tax officers to focus on the top tax payers in the UK. Now this follows on a development in 2009, where the new High Net Wealth Unit was developed, which focuses on the top five thousand tax payers in the UK, whose individual wealth is worth more than twenty million pounds.
In this edition of Personal Perspectives, my partner Paul Harrison, who heads our Tax Investigations practice in the UK, will explain how we should respond to this challenge, with strategies to deal with the investigations and enquiries that may follow. There are also a whole series of other articles in this magazine about current planning opportunities and things that we see developing in the market place.
Finally, I’m delighted to let you know that our private client practice has also been awarded the accolade of best accountancy team of the year by our contemporaries, in the form of the Society of Trusts and Estates Practitioners, or STEP. STEP have given us this award for the second time, and the only other time we could have entered for it, so we’re very pleased and it’s a great credit to the entire team. So to celebrate that success, we’ve included a further article in the magazine about the use of trusts and transferring wealth down to the next generation.
Of course, if there’s anything in the magazine that you’d like to ask a question about, or contact any member of the team, all of their contact details are included on the back pages. We look forward to hearing from you.
