Changes to NIC. In 2011…..

Hopefully you’re taking a well deserved break after the ACCA F6 exam last Monday. That is of course unless you’ve got another exam coming up next week!

However, even though you can relax a bit now when it comes to learning tax rules for the December 2009 exam, tax is in the headlines in the “non exam world”. On Wednesday, Alistair Darling, the UK Chancellor delivered his pre-Budget report.

The press in the UK has been full of stories recently about the high bonuses that a number of banks were planning on paying some of their staff. This was causing uproar amongst the majority of the public given that the public had bailed out the banks earlier this year. The Chancellor announced in his pre-Budget report that banks will have to pay a 50% tax on bonuses in excess of £25,000 that are paid between now and April next year.

However, probably of more interest to the “tax people” amongst us is that he announced that all rates of National Insurance (for employer, employee and self-employed) will increase by an additional 0.5% from April 2011 (this is in addition to the 0.5% increase announced in his pre-Budget report last year.

This change alone is expected to raise in the region of £4bn in the financial year 2011/12.

Whilst this is interesting to know make sure that you refer to the latest set of our ExPress notes to find out what rates of National Insurance are actually examinable in the exam you’re sitting!