Insurers’ bonuses escape tax

Insurance Times, 21 December
HM Revenue & Customs has changed it definitions of banks to stop the one-off 50% supertax on bonuses hitting insurers, the Guardian reports. "We have received representations that the definition of a bank inadvertently catches companies which would not be regarded as a bank from a commercial or legal perspective," HMRC said. "Having considered these, we think that the diversity of regulated investment activities undertaken by non-banking financial service groups in the UK means that the original definition of a 'bank' did not effectively exclude all the groups we intended to exclude. This resulted in a number of corporate groups inadvertently being brought within the definition of a 'banking group', and therefore within the scope of the bank payroll tax."

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