westgatelad wrote:
There isn’t a hc or ph driver out there making anywhere near the taxable threshold right now. So to be honest. No one needs to prove anything. The three months pay for your declared self assessment is going to be very welcomed by each and every one of us. Working still or not.
Indeed.
But while it's self-evident to the vast majority of us that profits are down due to Covid-19, that isn't how these things work. It's a condition of the grant that you "have lost trading profits due to COVID-19".
So how do you prove that if HMRC challenges your claim? Doubt it will happen in vast majority of cases, and most claims will be rubber-stamped, but I suspect some *will* be challenged.
And while the vast majority in the trade will have self-evidently lost profits, I daresay there's the odd driver somewhere doing better than normal out of it.
For example, if a driver is doing only school contracts, and they're continuing to get paid, then obviously there's no loss. In fact, they're presumably making more than normal if they're getting paid yet not incurring any additional costs - fuel, most obviously, but also wear and tear on car.
Again, for the vast majority the loss in profits will be obvious. But in other sectors in particular, it won't be so clear cut. Some small shops run by self-employed people will no doubt go under because of it all. But some shops selling essentials might do rather well out of it all. And even if a shop has lost some profit, how precisely would you attribute that to Covid-19? A business could easily be 5% down for a whole host of reasons, so it would depend on whether HMRC asks for evidence, and what kind of evidence they would require to link a drop in profits to Covid-19.
I'm not trying to be alarmist, just trying to think of evidence that might be useful to present to HMRC if they ask for proof of lost profits.