Posts by Doctor Syntax 42407 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Corp tax is on turnover"
If that's so they've changed it since my day! Corporation tax is on profits which involves taking off salary, employer's NI and any other costs. VAT, on the other hand isn't even part of turnover. VAT's added (the A in VAT is a clue) to the invoice, taken from the client on the behalf HMG and handed to them less any input VAT of the company but also without charging HMG for the service.
"But, a contractor doing the same job gets £1000 per day, doesn't want to pay normal rates of employee tax/NI but thinks that if they do pay the normal rates they should get 3 times the pay and all the benefits because their job is less secure? What is the premium for job security?"
The rates of employee tax are exactly the same. The NI is different. In effect it's higher. The contractor company pays employer's NI and the contractor pays employee's NI. Did nobody tell you that.
But you raise an interesting point about job security. What if everyone was directly employed by the engager? Everyone pays the same Income Tax, everyone pays employee's NI and the engager pays employer's NI, sick pay etc. What now differentiates the permie and freelance? Job security. How should we treat it? Quite clearly it's a valuable benefit in its own right and should be taxed as such. How about taxing all the HMRC staff on their benefit of secure jobs? I wonder how long it would be before his own staff revolted if a Chancellor proposed that.
"If that means you can't get work, maybe you need a thing called a job."
I'm retired but I did have a job. For that last 10 years before retiring that job was with my own company as a freelancer. The entity that engaged with the clients was that company. That company was paid by the clients, paid me, paid taxes, paid other expenses where needed and built up a reserve to keep on paying me when there was no client so that I could continue to have a job.
"IR35 is about you going to work for an employer, pretty much the only person you work for, and then opting-out of certain benefits by doing so"
It's not a matter of opting out by the contractor. It's the client who's opting out of paying them. It really gets rich when it's HMG that (a) opts out of paying benefits as an employer and (b) insists on taxing like one. If it were Boris as Chancellor one might understand it.
@Joe Harrison
"Which EU legislation specifically?"
This is indeed the sort of argument we get when we try to discuss Brexit in a logical way. Someone alleges something to be EU legislation. When one asks for a proper citation for this the request just gets dismissed because there's so much it would be too much trouble to find it. Could it be that this was just one more of those bits of "EU red tape" which, on closer inspection turns out to be one of those plastic tear-off strips from the opening of a biscuit cake packet that Boris dropped?
" If not, then you are cheating the system, if not legally then morally."
Morally? Taxation is the work of HMRC and, before them the IR. A thoroughly amoral organisation if ever I came across one.
Item 1. A cousin in law took very early retirement from the IR on account of stress brought on, he tells me, due to all the stuff he was required to do that he thought was wrong.
Item 2. About 3 years into contracting they decided to investigate me. Because they go back 6 years that went back into the last years of permie. For a fee my accountant handled all that. The contracting years/ Clean as a whistle. The permie years? It turned out I'd been screwed over. It was a pity they didn't go back further. I was due huge rebates. If you think taxation is moral you should stop and wonder if you, too, are being screwed.
"Training is not a cost, it is an investment."
As no beancounter ever said.
Actually, those who do look at it as an investment are likely to be freelance. And the investment doesn't just include the cost of the course. It includes cost of travel and accommodation if you're not based near to where the course is held. It also includes the loss of billable time.
"(as opposed to $$$$'day for big software house guys)"
And far from all those $$$$s go to the grunts doing the work. There will be several layers of management plus the sales suits plus all the wining and dining of the client management to come out of it. Then, of course, the shareholders get their cut.
My introduction to IT was working for one of those not quite so big software houses. One day those of us on the contract got to comparing the company's take with our own...
"Please explain to me why these people are trusted to administer the taxation of an entire country?"
Sir Humphrey: It has to be an entire country. There's no way they could administer the taxation of part of one.
Note to el Reg. Can we have a portrait of the late lamented Nigel Hawthorne as Sir Humphrey icon?
"As it stands it sounds like someone made a bad managerial decision."
Probably under-resourced the project and had to get someone in quickly.
Being instantly available doesn't come free. The agent's opening gambit "Are you available?" means "Are you currently out of contract?" and an affirmative answer means that the contractor has probably been out of contract for some time as that call only comes in the last week of a contract by occasional chance. That time out of contract is an overhead that gets put on the rate.
It may also be the case that there's nobody available locally. If not it means the contractor is having to commute weekly, live in digs and live out of a suitcase. That's extra costs and a charge for the discomfort of that arrangement.
If none of the above work the rate might have to be high enough to induce someone to break an existing contract - which brings a cost of loss of reputation by the existing client - or buy themselves out of one.
An alternative take on the situation the OP outlines is that the permies are selling themselves well short and that better rates are available, even as employees.
"Why don't they just get a proper job, entertain some degree of professional responsibility, and shut up?"
Do we hear envy speak? The sound of a dog barking in a manger?
Let me point something out to you with your proper job. Your employer has a couple of problems. One is that you and your colleagues aren't 100% reliable. Sometimes you go sick, go on holiday, have babies or just sometimes, inconsiderately quit. The other problem is that the work-load isn't 100% reliable either. There's business as usual, project work, migrations, annual peaks and so on. So your employer has to try to balance available staff with demands of work. There are a couple of solutions to fix this problem. One is to cease to be your employer; get rid of the lot of you and outsource it to someone who can share the work out amongst their own employees in a big office in India or wherever. The other is to keep you on, staffing at a reasonable level and get freelancers in to fill the gaps. Which works out best for you?
"As were all our secretaries who could do a good rendition of their manager's signature for run-of-the-mill stuff."
Rendition? I'm pretty sure in a lot of cases the secretary's version of the manager's sig was the only one. The manager's effort would have been considered a bad fake.
"Essential pieces of kit for a support person was a heavy-duty paperclip ready to unbend to eject reluctant floppies"
We had an alternative need for a paper clip. An HP tape drive was for some reason "smart" and would "learn" the arcane back and forward movements and currents of air needed to get the end to separate from the rest of the spool, waft it to the take-up spool and attach it there. (Why they didn't just let the operator thread the tape I don't know.) The drive would occasionally get into a state where it would go back and forth with no useful outcome. I suppose it had learned bad habits. There were a couple of contacts on the top of the deck a paper-clip's bread apart that had to be shorted to restart the learning process. Adding this facility always seemed to me to be a case of solving the wrong problem.
"Back in the real world there is time for testing or time for fixing the bugs discovered during testing or neither. Minimal viable product tends to be what is delivered irrespective of development time."
This is a lesson that needs to be learned by manglement. It never happens because when you know you're always right, why would you have to learn anything.
"The OP has a good point. I think the the tech community (that's us) needs to get behind the concept of accessibility and start suggesting potential ways to keep both sides as happy as possible"
Fine. Here's my suggestion.
He puts out a tender for contract to build this supposed wonderful tech. He makes himself happy because he's Doing Something (politician's syllogism at work here). The winner of the contract is happy. The rest of us are happy because we know that (a) nothing will be delivered because it's not real and (b) it'll be one of the usual suspects who gets the contract so it will look like business as usual when nothing gets delivers.
"One solution would be to mandate that copies of all private keys be kept in escrow where only trusted law enforcement could access it."
You are, of course right. But you just move the problem to ensuring that only trusted law enforcement could access it and only in appropriate circumstances*. And a few others such as if the product is sold outside the US's jurisdiction how do you ensure that the private keys for those customers don't also go into escrow.
That, of course, applies to US products. It doesn't do anything about software produced overseas or open sourced; you know, the software that anyone wanting to do anything remotely dodgy would then turn to. That software would be made illegal? Let me repeat what I've said before. You do not inhibit someone intending to break laws by providing them with more laws to break.
* For avoidance of doubt appropriate circumstances don't include checking up on the neighbours and going on fishing trips. They do, however not just include but require due process of law to obtain a warrant.
"If you think that someone with a PhD needs to be earning over 100k to demonstrate that there is a skills shortage then you are living in a fantasy land"
£100k is still less than the figure needed to escape the cap so it appears to be approaching the territory that the govt reckons would be result of a skills shortage. Unless, of course, the cap is the result of some other criterion HMG is working to and they don't actually mind skills shortages.
The IT challenges posed by Brexit to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) are "significantly less complex" than its woeful Common Agricultural Payments system
Of course. They'd be able to declare the requirement for their system to be whatever the system managed to do. It's so much simpler when you don't have to work to someone else's specification.
(In the past I've asked for a specification for S/W I was to write and, in effect, been told that whatever I did would be the spec. I lest.)
"I've got no problem with anyone reporting illegal child porn to authorities"
To find it they have to look at file contents.
If you take your PC in to a technician it will have your private stuff on it. Bank statements. Password lists. Contact lists. A diary. Your personal family photographs. Stuff you're working on which you regard as your IP and consider potentially valuable. Your employer's IP.
Do you still not have a problem with anyone knowing there's stuff to report?
"If you're a doctor, lawyer etc and have identifiable information about patients / clients then dropping your computer off at PC World is likely a breach of data protection legislation."
If there were a problem with it it would have to be handed over to a technician somewhere. That technician has to be trusted. The technician at PC World will take his medical ailments to his doctor and trust that he will be treated ethically. Why shouldn't it work the other way around?
PC World should be subject to the DPA and/or any other relevant regulation just like any other business handling data.
"Yup, however if a file name or image is seen that is suspicious"
File name, maybe in limited curcumstance. Image - why are you looking at images on a customer's computer?
Let's presume the customer to be innocent of anything, an old-fashioned assumption admittedly but an essential one if we wish to live in a free society. So what might be on the computer? All manner of personal stuff if it's consumer machine, all manner of commercial material if it's a business computer.
The default assumption must be that it's confidential to the owner and/or user. In the case of personal stuff, at least in Europe, it will arguably* be protected by existing personal data legislation and even more so under GDPR. In the case of a commercial machine there's likely to be commercially sensitive material on there, some of it subject to various regulatory regimes: financial, medical etc. To go poking around in contents, even listing file names, of anything not immediately relevant to the work that's being done is at minimum a breach of confidence and quite possibly a breach of other legislation or regulation.
TL;DR A tech has no right to go poking around in the PC's contents.
* There must be an argument that anyone accessing a PC is at the time the processor of any day data file they open.
"considerable investment from the European Union in the form of projects such as high-speed internet connectivity."
Cornwall should have rather a lot of internet. Porthcurno is still the landing point for trans-Atlantic and other cables,
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/02/15/geeks_guide_to_britain_porthcurno/
What's a connected device?
On the face of it my laptop is a connected device. Am I to be supplied with a unique password by the manufacturer which I can't then change?
What about something like a Kodi box? I can build one of those with a Raspberry Pi and as everybody but possibly Matt Hancock knows those can be given entirely new OSs simply by swapping the SD card. Is someone taking the Pis?
"The code states that all passwords on new devices and products are unique and cannot be reset to a factory default"
Not the best solution I'd have thought. A better one is that the out of box state is non-functional and requires a password to be set to become functional. A reset reverts it to out of box state.
I take Pen-y-gors' point about a remote reset by a hacker. The solution there would be that setting the password requires physical access to the device, say press a button on the device and you have a minute to set a password.
Someone places the device where they can't reach it and it gets remotely reset? There problem which is considerably better than being everybody else's.
"It's not really user generated data; it's data generated by the vehicle system, and there's no reasonable presumption such a system would wilfully lie if working as intended."
There is, however, an unreasonable presumption that the system will work as intended and that nobody will get at it to make it lie.
"Microsoft already have a security model that blocks the ability for their US employees to access data in other jurisdictions without local data custodian approval"
The only place I've read of this being used is in Germany. If it's deployed elsewhere they seem to have kept quiet about it. There's also a question of whether it would survive the CLOUD act whose purpose appears to be to make extra-territorial jurisdiction explicit.
Hancock also shrugged off Cherry's statement that legal opinions suggested the immigration exemption would not be permissible under the GDPR, saying simply that "there are always legal opinions about everything".
Indeed there are and the place where these get resolved is in court. Maybe the prospect of a fine of 4% of HMGs revenue ought to concentrate his mind. Perhaps someone should ask the Chancellor if his budget contains provision for this.
