Reply To: New UK Finance Bill in effect – Self Employed? Watch out!!

After giving this some further thought….

I would suggest that, for those of you living outside the UK (no matter what nationality you are) and working in the North sea through an agency, you will either have to operated under a Ltd Co (This almost certainly means carrying your own UK employers liability insurance) or be taken on PAYE in the UK and have UK NIC’s and tax deducted at source.

This is certainly the best way forward. I have been contacted by 3 agencies in the past week to provide services to self-employed contractors, either to help them manage a LTD company or to provide an umbrella company service.

Don’t be naive, they are closing in on Umbrellas as well.

I would suggest that any person living in or out of the UK, working within the North sea for example, uses an agency outside of the UK.
An agency outside of the UK jurisdiction does not have PAYE or NIC responsibilities. Or have I missed something?

If you work inside UK waters then you are liable for UK tax and NIC’s irrespective of what agency you work for. Whether you can claim tax reliefs is another matter. That would depend on who pays you, where they are based, what type of vessel you work on, etc, etc, etc – nothing is as simple thinking that using offshore agencies or offshore anything is going to exempt taxation legally.