BBC staff are said to be in ‘revolt’ following pledges to end paying staff through their own personal service companies.
A number of the BBC’s most famous faces, including Newsnight’s Jeremy Paxman and newsreader Fiona Bruce, are said to be in a clash with the media giants concerning payment through limited companies.
The BBC has informed the Government that it would move ‘within weeks’ to phase out the contracts, but with more than 6,000 freelancers involved, many of whom are high-profile ‘stars’, the corporation is said to be struggling as it attempts to determine and assess the way in which their temporary staff are paid.
deep trouble.”
Rod Liddle, the former editor of Radio 4’s Today programme, had stated that the process is not as simple as perhaps first thought.
‘The BBC have announced something that has turned out to be very difficult.’
Liddle goes on to say that staff are in ‘open revolt’ as it is thought that shifting freelance contractors onto the PAYE payroll could result in an effective pay cut of between 10 and 20 per cent.
‘The BBC is in deep trouble, right now its top presenters are all out of contract because of the concerns that some of them used private companies to squirrel away their dosh.’
Related Article – BBC’s Tax Avoiding Bloomers
Surely the simple solution to this is to apply existing IR35 legislation to these so called stars.
Clearly they are disguised employees and should be jumped on by HMRC who should demand back taxes and interest charges going back as far as the legislation allows.
HMRC seem to have no problem going after IT contractors, so why don’t they go after BBC staff and the corporation itself, which has clearly colluded in what looks like tax evasion.
Like Tony, I don’t understand why HMRC is pussyfooting around. It can simply bypass the BBC and apply the IR35 rules directly to those people (ab)using these service contracts.
I have no problem with genuine freelancers who hop from job to job and client to client (and who may be out of work for periods of time), but these “disguised employees” who remain with the BBC for year after year are just taking the mickey.
But surely some of the “Celebs” do work in a freelance manner (Rachel Riley has been working with PCG recently?) People like Clarkson (love him or not) he does his own newspaper articles, books, DVDs as well as TG. Not sure how the beeb will get around this?