Iain Donaldson, partner at Hill Dickinson, considers the barriers to frictionless trade under a post-Brexit VAT regime facing hard or soft borders

Prosecutors in Spain have accused former Spanish international player, Xabi Alonso, of defrauding the Spanish state of €2m (£1.7m) between 2010 and 2012, and are seeking a five-year jail sentence and €4m fine

Mossack Fonseca, the offshore law firm whose 11.5 million leaked files were at the heart of the Panama Papers tax avoidance investigation, is to close

With just over two weeks to go until Scotland’s devolved tax rates come into effect, HMRC has published a notice of how five UK tax reliefs will continue to work as they were intended when Scottish rate of income tax (SRIT) and bands change in April 2018

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has upheld HMRC’s complaint about advertising of a tax avoidance scheme by promoter CDP Tax & Wealth Ltd, which trades as Fiducia Wealth and Tax, ruling its adverts contain misleading claims, and must be withdrawn

BBC presenters have told MPs they felt ‘forced’ to set up personal service companies (PSCs) when offered regular work by the broadcaster, which has said it plans to set up a dispute resolution process to investigate whether it should pay employers National Insurance Contributions (NICs) on such arrangements

New legislation making online marketplaces more accountable for VAT fraud committed by online sellers on their platforms have come into force this week, as part of a package of measures in Finance Act 2018 which the Treasury says are set to raise an additional £1.2bn in tax

HMRC has signalled it is extending its flagship Making Tax Digital initiative to include income tax reporting, by offering self employed individuals and their agents the opportunity to join a pilot for using software to keep business record digitally and send income tax updates to HMRC, instead of filing a self assessment tax return

Political pressure has seen the government backtrack on plans to abolish the salary sacrifice employer childcare voucher (CCV) scheme following the introduction of its new tax-free childcare option, and the vouchers will now be available for an additional six months, which some commentators suggest will cause confusion

The US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) plans to close the offshore voluntary disclosure program (OVDP) which allows US taxpayers to declare non-compliant offshore assets from 28 September

PwC has been brought in to advise Conviviality, the wholesaler and distributor of alcohol and impulse products, after the company discovered it had a £30m tax bill which had not been included in its short term cashflow projections

The American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) is calling for regulatory relief for certain controlled foreign corporation (CFC) taxpayers affected by what it describes as ‘unintended consequences’ from President Trump’s recent tax reforms