At this time of year plans centre on enjoying Christmas festivities and getting together with family and friends.
Given that this year may be one many farmers would prefer to forget, thoughts may turn to next year.
With that in mind, there are a few points to note of particular interest from a tax perspective which arise in the early part of 2015.
Farmers are generally either self-employed or employed as a director of their family farming company.
Either way, most are subjected to the annual ritual of the tax return.
Although an annual event, this does still seem to take many by surprise with the bulk of returns being filed in January to meet the deadline of the 31st.
Some brave souls just over 1,500 last year completed their return on Christmas day.
Most, however, will engage an accountant to complete their return and apart from avoiding a fine for late submission, there are good commercial reasons for completing it early.
Knowing in advance how much is due and thus planning cash flow, is an obvious reason, but having affairs up to date allows the opportunity to review ways in which the bill can be reduced.
With poor trading results arising in many farming sectors in 2014, tax bills due on January 31 should be reviewed now for farmers averaging, loss claims or reductions to payments on account.
January also brings with it the scam emails from ‘HMRC’.
Taxpayers reported almost 75,000 scam emails to HMRC’s dedicated phishing email account between April and September 2014 a 70% increase from the same period last year, with more than 4,000 sites being closed down.
January is a favourite month for the fraudsters as they know many taxpayers are expecting a refund and therefore they offer to pay the refund only to raid the taxpayer’s bank account instead.
HMRC pay refunds direct into the taxpayer’s account which the taxpayer details on their tax return.
HMRC do not email taxpayers asking for bank details.
Taxpayers should remain vigilant since, rather confusingly, HMRC are changing their official website address thus giving more scope for the fraudsters to contact taxpayers.
The usual HMRC site remains in place just now for online services for submitting personal and corporate self assessment tax returns, PAYE and other online reports.
However, some time in 2015, HMRC will switch to www.gov.uk.
Early 2015 is also likely to see a race to sell farmland or plots for housing development as April heralds the new Scottish Land and Buildings Transaction Tax (LBTT).
Rates of tax are higher under LBTT than they are under stamp duty.
Both systems charge no levy on commercial property purchased up to the value of £150,000, but whereas the current system then taxes property values between £150,000 and £250,000 at 1%, property values between £250,000 and £500,000 at 3% and property values over £500,000 at 4%, the new LBTT levies 3% on property values between £150,000 and £350,000 and the tax increases to 4.5% for the value in excess of £350,000.
As an example, a farm purchased for £2 million attracts a tax charge of £68,500.
In April, this tax increases to £80,250, an increase of 17%.
Deals in the pipeline should be concluded before the new rates apply.