Unless you’ve been under a rock, or never researched different property owning structures, you will heard of an LLP. You might not know what one is but those three letters will be familiar.
To some LLPs are a silver bullet that solves all ailments. For others they are a complete irrelevance. In markets that are artificially skewed by tax such as the property market you end up with people that look ever harder for silver bullets. Some see them where they don’t exist but others purposely misrepresent for financial gain.
The property market has seen an explosion in claims scammers and bad advice which simply would not need to exist if George Osborne had not set out to put his thumb on the scales in 2015.
Why do HMRC look at LLPs so much? Probably because they have become the lynchpin on which most planning is based in property at the moment. For some the plain vanilla tax rules give enough but for others they want vanilla with a flake and nuts on top. This is where scheme promoters step in and promise the world.
HMRC though like to remind us now and then that they know what’s going on and are planning to stop it.
This is where Spotlights come in. The latest on LLP abuse (as they see it) is here.
What’s interesting about a Spotlight is that if you do something they have turned the spotlight on to and it does not work the penalties and punishment will be that much greater. Why? Because they told you before you did it that they believed it did not work but you did it anyway.
Moral of the story? If a promoter is pitching something cast an eye over the HMRC pages to see if they have already covered it. Also, for most people, vanilla is enough!