Revenue seeks generic IR35 ruling to cover AMEC and Motorola contractors

My accountant has spoken to the Inspector who is now in charge of the review, and has asked him to consider dropping the investigation due to the gross mis-handling, telling him if he cannot come to this conclusion then we will approach the area director and that I will complain to my MP....which makes me think, being in Scotland should this be my MP or MSP?? Confusing isn't it!

From the conversation my accountant had with the inspector it seems that the Revenue are keen to progress all the way with my case because the end clients are large multi-nationals. Seemingly the Inspector stated that they are attempting to make a generic judgement, based on my review, which will then be used as the initial judgement for any other contractor undertaking work for these end clients. The end clients in question are AMEC and Motorola.

So what they are hoping is that they can deem me inside IR35 and then anyone else under review with the same end clients will automatically be deemed the same, thus saving the Revenue time and then putting the onus on the contractor to appeal the decision. Their view is that every contractor working for the same end client will be under the same set of conditions and therefore direction and control, therefore if one is found within IR35 then everyone else will be likewise. My accountant got the impression that this was now going to be Revenue procedure from here on in as they simply don't have the resources to carry out a full and proper review of every individual case.

Seemingly he made the point strongly that this is unacceptable, that especially the likes of AMEC can have numerous sites and projects on the go simultaneously and each will be controlled by a different project manager (usually contract also) and he will run that site with the levels of control that he personally sees fit. But here lies the problem, because most of the management structure on each individual project is contract, once that project is complete the management is broken up and goes its separate ways so the Revenue have no individual to interview with direct knowledge of the day to day workings of a particular site.

So rather than refer back to the wordings of the contracts which in my view are outside IR35 they are digging deeper and hoping to interview AMEC head office and produce this generic scope for the future based on my review.

My accountant says that if they do not drop the case due to the mis-handling (which he doesn't believe they will do) then he is going to withdraw all permissions to speak to end clients. They were given permission initially as long as the people being interviewed had direct knowledge of the day-to-day working of any contract, and it was felt that we should show co-operation on this aspect as we were confident of the outcome. They have had 18 months+ to carry this out so the accountant thinks it will not undermine our position if we eventually end up in front of the commissioners if we now withdraw this permission and force them to make a decision based on the contracts and the information provided by me.

Any thoughts on the continuing saga would be appreciated.

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AlexA