As many of you know with my other non anonymised hat on I own and operate a legitimate business…. for many years / most of my life I have been the sort of person who had little use for the state, so on the one hand I was quite happy to work the black economy and do cash in hand jobs, on the other hand the state never even knew I existed, much less came to my aid or supported me in any way.
Of course in 1990 if you had a driving job that paid cash it is not the same as a driving job in 2018, not even fucking remotely similar.
I hesitate to say it not because with my other hat on and my small business I am as dodgy as fuck, because the fact is I am extremely careful to do everything 100% legal and even employ and pay people such as accountants etc to ensure that all required legal things are in order and done exactly as they should be.
An audit from the dreaded “Revenue Men” (now all harpy vindictive wimminz) is a pain in the ass that causes me to waste a morning with them and the accountant going through everything, it’s bullshit and a pain in the ass and it wastes my time and money and all that, but it doesn’t worry me, because there is no wrongdoing to find.
As many of you also know I have a strong background in IT and technology, and “digital life” filled me with the heebie jeebies from very very early on, so while it was inevitable that digital life would take over, it was also obvious to me that I had to sanitise it wherever possible, so for example I never signed up for fuckbook or any of the other social media sites, the closest I ever came was Napster.
I know this doesn’t fully protect me because everyone else signs up for social media sites, so you can’t stay off the radar, but I was not busy uploading photos of myself only to discover years later that facial recognition was now a thing and not a science fiction thing, or that cross database comparison and metadata was now a thing and not a science fiction thing.
Google location history and calls and sms backed up to the google cloud for google to trawl through I did sign up for, because I had first hand experience of scenarios where I was falsely accused of many evil things by the psycho skank ho ex, and I had no alibi as such…. my reasoning being that NOT signing up for it would NOT mean I was NOT tracked, again I was proven right time and again with revelation after revelation about these places tracking your every move… but signing up for it means I can access that history at will.
Like I said, I am 100% legal with my business hat on, and google location tracking allowed me to prove in about 30 seconds that a given expense being claimed against tax was genuine, yup, here I am at this expo, just as my expense claims said…. accurate to a few meters and yes I arrived at the venue at 8:30 am and left at 6:00 pm for both days.
No, the “hesitation” I feel, and the reason I cannot touch this with a bargepole on the business blog, is because I am one of the few.
I’ll point you back at previous posts about taxation and limited companies, I found out today that a local well known gentleman who is known in the media as a personality and who is a property owner of some note who leases several properties to other local businesses is as dodgy as fuck, as in he is not registered anywhere he needs to be by law for taxation and other purposes, neither has he taken for himself the legal protections available to him by company formation or anything else… don’t get me wrong, the guy probably is not doing the state out of anything, overall, or if he is it is small potatoes.
No, his error is in effect that he is not doing what I am doing by being 100% legal, he is not acting as an unpaid state tax collector and information producing drone, which is basically what being 100% legal in the digital age means.
I had to say to the guy I can’t work for you, or rather, I can, but if I do I’m going to be producing paperwork that will be used to hang you out to dry…. are you sure you want to go down this road?
The thing is, he isn’t alone, 99% of the time I have no idea about people’s private business or how they run their business, but, being local, a lot of the time I do, people talk…. understand…
And none of these people are actual crooks, they are just running off the books as it were, or with two sets of books to use the old expression.
They know it’s been a bad week if their wallet is empty.
But, being it is a digital age with interconnected databases and everything else, WHEN, and it will be WHEN the revenue man comes calling, they will all be treated as “fraudsters” and fraudsters with malice aforethought, the state revenue men will argue in state courts that the excuses these people are trying to give for their fraud are all bullshit, the law is the law, throw the book at them m’lud.
And of course legally “I wasn’t hurting anyone” and “I didn’t con anyone or steal anything” and “I am a welder and fabricator, what do I know about book keeping, look I make a living and drive a ten year old car, why am I being treated like Bernie Madoff?” all sounds the same to the courts, it sounds like “Guilty as charged”.
And because 99.9% of them are not crooks pulling a fast one, 99.9% of them won’t have a limited liability company to hide behind, so the revenue can take everything, home and contents, car and contents, tools of the trade, kids toys, bank accounts pensions you name it, literally everything except the clothes you are wearing in court.
And they will, it is what they do.
I can literally walk you down various rows of commercial or industrial units around here and point at them and say that one, that one, not that one, don’t know about that one, that one, don’t know about that one, and all the “that ones” are flying by night and wide open to this sort of future.
It’s actually worse than this, but I really cannot go into further detail as this blog isn’t anonymous as far as the state is concerned, and if I say much more you could put 2 and 2 together and identify actual people, and I have no wish to do the state’s dirty work for them.
No, this tale of woe is for people who do not understand what a Law firm or an Accountancy firm does, because a local guy let slip in passing something to his law firm.
The law firm already knew he was in breach of a couple of mandatory reporting laws, but didn’t do anything about it as they themselves were under no legal compunction to do so, but when he let slip that he had “passed on” a bill plus VAT to a customer of his, they had a legal duty to report him, because he wasn’t vat registered, so they did… turns out this incident was over a year ago, piece in the paper today about the auction where all his shit is up for grabs… including the two shops his great grandad built… that he inherited from his dad that he ran the way everyone always had, pay me rent and get on with your business.
The cynic in me says the law firm that grassed him up to the state can also act as his defence counsel against the state and be a primary creditor and rack up more fees and income to come from the auctioned estate… win / win.
The realist in me says maybe 20% of small local business (eg 5 or less total workers) is legal, which means 80% of local business could be taken to the cleaners by the state and literally wiped out.
Which instantly puts me in mind of an old mate who I ain’t seen for years who had a building business with 12 employees, full order books for the next 18 months and great prospects, but, an ongoing operating loan facility from the bank, who called him one one day in the last recession and called in the ticket, which instantly wiped him out, left customers with incomplete work and put 12 guys on the dole, as the bank said, we are pulling your ticket in because you can pay up.
I can see the state fucking over at least 75% of the 80% of local businesses that are non compliant for the same reason, they have assets that can be seized and sold off, and 60% of local small businesses is a *lot* of assets, especially if you “harvest” them carefully and don’t put the rest into panic mode.
I have now seen three such local businesses taken to the cleaners in the past 18 months, two of the proprietors got suspended sentences for their “fraud” in addition to basically losing all their shit.
The rich irony is that me running my business 100% legally may make the state a couple of k per annum as opposed to how things would be if I ran it black, because the fact is when you go 100% legal not only CAN you claim for all sorts of shit the fact is you MUST to offset the extra monies you are now paying to the state.
As a small high tech business in the black my IT costs might be 6k pa, as a small high tech business running 100% legal my IT costs are 5k plus 1k tax that I can claim back.
As a householder or sole trader working from home I would pay standard domestic rates for electricity of around 20/21 p per kWh, as a legit business in a proper business unit with a business supply I pay around 14/15p
If you are a small trader paying 7 quid plus vat per square foot and you have 1,000 square feet you’re paying 8400 pa ground rent, go legal and you can claim 1400 of that back.
It reminds me forcefully of the farce that the traditional family unit faces, they pay 8k a year in taxes but get 5k a year back in various credits and allowances, why not just streamline the whole fucking system and just tax them 3k?
Why not because it’s not about streamlining a system, it’s about fuckbook style building as many data points as possible, because that way there is no way to sneak anything off to the side.
I own my business and I own the company and I own the equipment and there aren’t any loans or debts or anything… and every penny that company has is money I worked for… yet, if my car dies and I want 1k to buy a new used one… it is illegal for me to use the company bank account to buy it, and it is illegal for me to write a cheque to myself to buy it.
To be sure there are ways, if the company owes me 50k that I invested setting it up, then the company can repay me 1k of that loan and I can go out and buy that car, but doing it one way will land you in jail with all your assets gone, doing it the other way is fine.
But to 99.9% of small businesses they do not see that, my business, I did all the work, I went without to buy tools and shit, so it’s my money, so whats the problem me buying myself a 1k car with my money?
The problem is small businesses do not understand what I understand with my 100% legal and above board business hat on, that there is no such thing as “my” money.
It’s like an iphone, you never bought it, you just bought the lease to use it in ways approved by crapple, fuck you very much.
The same is true of money, you never earned it, you do not own it, you are just licenced to use it in ways approved by the state, fuck you very much.
Me personally, I wimped out, I looked and that land and saw the way the wind was blowing and decided to go 100% legal and legit and above board…. insert pic of scots jerk with blue cross on his face running away as fast as he can, it’s called survival.
Hilariously I have a business account with Amazon, and getting vat receipts out of them is hit and miss at best, but again the way they do it is legal, they are like paypal, a bank that isn’t a bank, so they are a vendor that isn’t a vendor, so for their shitI have to do the math, I will be charged VAT but I’ll probably never be able to claim it back, so is the amazon product both equivalent and more than 30% cheaper than an alternative supplier who will give me a vat receipt?
Often the answer is no, but Amazon are not a small local business running under the radar, they are a huge business with hundreds of lawyers and lobbyists on the payroll, and they have forgotten more about tax avoidance than thee or me will ever know.
And NOBODY is going to be on side with the ever increasing number of small businesses taken to the cleaners and wiped out…. people who over all aren’t actually ripping the state off for much, but people who over all are largely responsible for the fact that we have any kind of local economy.
I suspect 2.5% of my effort and time at work have nothing to do with production or sales or anything else, it is what I call utterly wasted time spent ensuring that everything I do is 100% legal and compliant.
Nobody wins except big data and the state that hold it.
As you can probably tell from this article, I’m probably the last person in the world to grass anyone else up, your business is your business, but the fact is the system is set up so that the only way I can be legal is to collect data, data that can and will be used to mine those flying under the radar.
Gattaca and everything else got it utterly wrong, people who remember the Stasi got it right, everyone becomes an informant, whether they like it or not…. if you dislike it enough you can stand over there with the accused and wait your turn to get royally fucked over.
The three guys I mentioned, two of whom now have suspended prison sentences for fraud, all three of whom are now penniless and asset less, what changes are they going to make, who are they going to influence, who is going to listen to them?
One sold sub 1000 quid used cars, cheap and cheerful, plenty of faults but nothing you couldn’t live with or fix, they were sub 1k cars for fucks sake, what do you want, a new merc?
One was a general welder and fabricator, he’d do anything from put the hinge back on your garden gate to making a bracket to hold your tv aerial.
One was a fish and chip shop, everything cooked in dripping and local fish and local potatoes peeled and chipped in the shop, so it was bloody good grub.
They have all been fucked now, and the state is no better off, and the local economy is less vital.
But, that’s three more “dark data web” businesses eradicated, and that was the only point.
Be careful out there.
