* Posts by Matticulas

2 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Aug 2015

It's happening, tech contractors: UK.gov is pushing IR35 off-payroll rules to private sector in Finance Bill

Matticulas

Re: Just asking (for a friend naturally)

It's worse than that - Indian consulting companies mostly pay little or no tax for their Indian employees' UK wages when they're onshore in the UK. I worked for one such company and HMRC give them a tax concession for bringing in workers to plug a "skills shortage" (and they do it for all of foreign companies plugging a "skills gap"), besides we had to train most of them once they got here.

The concession is that the foreign workers pay no PAYE or National Insurance on the wages for the first year and then some NI in the second year, so all the Indian company would do is send the worker back to India after 2 years and replace them with another with all the clock now reset for all the tax advantages on wages.

This surely would create a skill shortage amongst UK nationals because a UK company can't compete with Indian company with a big tax advantage. It also deprives the government purse and then we're expected to plug it!

Windows 10: Buy cheap, buy twice, right? Buy FREE ... buy FOREVER

Matticulas

How Microsoft plan to make us pay!

If you're upgrading from a full licenced copy of Windows 7 or 8.1 then you get a Windows 10 licence that's like an old Windows OEM licence. Hence if you ever change your PC's internal hardware (i.e. motherboard, CPU, GPU) then the hash code for your unique hardware combination will change and Windows 10 will ask you to reactivate your copy. Your choice at this point will be to pay Microsoft for a new licence or downgrade to your previous version of Windows (which I guess may have to be a clean reinstall, so make sure you don't keep data on your system drive). Alternatively leave your hardware as is.

I don't think many people are clear on these conditions but it certainly seems that it's Microsoft's plan to give us our first taste of Windows 10 for free and once were addicted then they're going to make us pay.