Consultation outcome

Sole Enterprise Protected Assets discussion document

From:: Office of Tax Simplification
Published: 18 July 2016
Last updated: 6 August 2018 — See all updates

Detail of outcome

This consultation has concluded. Results can be found in the OTS’s report ‘SEPA: Sole Enterprise with Protected Asset’.

Original consultation

Consultation description

*[SEPA): Sole Enterprise with Protected Assets

The OTS found during the Small Company Taxation (SCT) review that many of the smallest companies struggled with the tax compliance burdens associated with being a company. At the same time it was discovered that, as reported in Ipsos MORI’s prior research, the most common reason given by small companies for incorporation was for limited liability rather than tax reasons.

Following the OTS’s report, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury endorsed our recommendation that the OTS further explore a Sole Enterprise with Protected Assets (SEPA)[1] model, which would make provision for protecting one or more of the assets of a self-employed individual.

This discussion paper sets out what we think SEPA would look like and poses 8 questions with the ultimate aim of finding out whether something like this would actually be used by businesses and if it would actually prove to be a simplification. We would be grateful for any thoughts you may have via email. We will be publishing our conclusions in a final report in early October.

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