Capital Gearing Share Discussion Threads

[miata] 20/3/2013 14:01

"the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme, launched at Budget 2012, offers
50 per cent income tax relief on investments made into small, early-stage companies. The Government has decided to provide a limited extension of the capital gains tax holiday to continue to encourage investors to take up the new scheme. Any investors making capital gains in 2013-14 will receive a 50 per cent capital gains tax relief when they reinvest those gains into seed companies in either 2013-14 or 2014-15.
The recent expansions to Venture Capital Trusts (VCTs) and the Enterprise Investment Scheme, alongside the new Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme, mean that the UK now offers generous enterprise tax reliefs to support small and growing businesses. The Government is committed to ensuring that these schemes are effective and has sought to maintain stability by not making major changes. However, following a number of representations from investors, the Government is concerned that VCTs offering enhanced buy-backs are not operating within the spirit of the legislation. The Government will continue to monitor particular aspects of the venture capital schemes to ensure that they remain well-focused and supportive of businesses needs.

1.132 Long-term economic success depends on today's small and high growth companies being able to access affordable long term financing to grow into the large businesses of tomorrow. On 13 March 2013 the Government launched a consultation on extending Individual Savings Account (ISA) eligibility to include a wider range of small company shares. To further support these companies, the Government will abolish Stamp Tax on Shares for companies listed on growth markets including the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) and the ISDX Growth Market, from April 2014. This will directly benefit hundreds of smaller quoted UK firms, lowering their cost of capital, helping to promote jobs and growth.

[celeritas] 20/3/2013 13:56

2.121 Stamp tax on shares: growth markets – Following consultation, the Government will
abolish stamp tax on shares in companies quoted on growth markets such as the Alternative
Investment Market and the ISDX Growth Market. (Finance Bill 2014) (31)

[celeritas] 20/3/2013 13:55

2.121 Stamp tax on shares: growth markets – Following consultation, the Government will
abolish stamp tax on shares in companies quoted on growth markets such as the Alternative
Investment Market and the ISDX Growth Market. (Finance Bill 2014) (31)

[gengulphus] 18/3/2013 09:57

I suspect they'll introduce the ISA for AIM but state that CGT allowance no longer applies for share dealing? Thoughts?

I think a reduced CGT allowance that applies across the board would be quite a lot more likely than keeping the current allowance but disallowing its use specifically for shares. HMRC's systems work on the basis that most people's tax affairs can be dealt with adequately by automatic mechanisms like PAYE, deduction of tax at source from bank interest, and tax code adjustments. Those last work well for small amounts of extra income that is more-or-less the same each year. But capital gains are generally highly variable from year to year - basically the only way to deal with them is to require a return each year from each taxpayer who might have to pay CGT, and I don't think HMRC are geared up to handling the sort of number of returns that would be required if the CGT allowance on share transactions were effectively reduced to zero. The current high level of the CGT allowance keeps the number of returns to be processed down.

On top of that, as the rules about CGT computations stand, effectively forcing everyone who trades shares to submit a tax return about their CGT would be immensely unpopular - not just because of the amount of tax to be paid, but because of the amount of head-scratching involved. Working out the gain or loss on anything other than a simple "buy N shares, later sell N shares" pair of trades rapidly gets complicated by apportionments, counterintuitive share-matching rules such as the 30-day rule, etc - and it just takes a corporate action such as a takeover for shares or a return of capital to introduce the complications even if the investor tries to stick to "buy N shares, later sell N shares" pairs... Indeed, while I think an across-the-board CGT allowance reduction more likely than one targetted at shares only, I also think that any major reduction would have to be accompanied by changes to CGT computations to make them doable by brokers' systems (not possible under the present rules because a sell on one account can very easily be required to be matched to a buy on a different account) and requiring brokers to add a statement of capital gains and losses to the yearly consolidated tax voucher, alongside the existing statements of dividends and PIDs earned. I.e. make the process of reporting capital gains and losses as straightforward for the taxpayer as that for dividends - collect figures from each broker's statement and add them up - at least for the vast majority of taxpayers.

If one invests say 10k in a share ISA and loses £8000.... will we be able to offset those losses against share profits made outside of the ISA?

No. Exemption of share ISAs from CGT cuts both ways: neither the gains nor the losses realised within the ISA go into the CGT computations at all. There are good reasons for that - if ISA gains were exempt but ISA losses could be offset, it wouldn't be long before tax-avoidance schemes were set up based on creating matched pairs of gains and losses within ISAs... And there's no good reason why allowing AIM shares in ISAs should change any of that.

Gengulphus

[miata] 17/3/2013 19:48

Difficult to imagine HMRC handling the amount of work involved in agreeing CGT calculations if the annual exempt amount was abolished.

[lw425] 17/3/2013 19:28

Regarding imminent change to allow AIM shares in ISA

I can't believe we'll also keep the CGT exemption of £10600.

I suspect they'll introduce the ISA for AIM but state that CGT allowance no longer applies for share dealing? Thoughts?

If one invests say 10k in a share ISA and loses £8000.... will we be able to offset those losses against share profits made outside of the ISA?

At least the liquidity of AIM might improve?

[david77] 17/3/2013 11:48

From

Paras 3.9 and 3.10 say that shares currently qualifying for IHT relief would not lose that benefit.

[zimbi] 14/3/2013 08:46

Gengulphus
Many thanks for this. I will be back with some more questions when I have time to digest.

[gengulphus] 13/3/2013 19:20

1 Is it possible to give one's spouse £10600 worth of shares from a trading account? How does this work? Do you simply sell shares to that value and then transfer the cash and then buy back the shares in her account? Is this transfer neutral in terms of CGT?

As david77 says, get the broker to transfer the shares from your account to your wife's account. That's very easy and straightforward if the two accounts are with the same broker, but can also be done if they are with different brokers. Details of how to do it are broker-dependent, so talk to the broker(s) about how to do it.

The point of doing it as a gift (i.e. nothing taken or expected in return) is that transfers that are gifts between living individuals are exempt from stamp duty.

To make full use of your spouse's CGT allowance, the gift should not be of £10,600 of shares, but of shares on which you have currently got a gain of £10,600. For instance, if the shares you give have tripled in price since you bought them, you want to give your spouse shares that you originally bought for £5,300 and that are now worth £15,900.

The method works because of a special rule about inter-spouse transfers: regardless of what (if anything) the transferee pays the transferor for them, the CGT computation is done as though the transferee had paid the transferor the transferor's allowable costs. That means that the transferor disposes of the shares on the date of the transferor, for a gain/loss of his or her allowable costs minus his or her allowable costs, i.e. neither a gain nor a loss, and the transferee is subsequently treated as having acquired them for the transferor's allowable costs on the date of the transfer. So the one point I disagree with in david77's reply is the "original buy date and price" - it should be "transfer date and original buy price". (Back in the days of taper relief, it used to be that both the original buy date and the transfer date were relevant - the original buy date for taper relief purposes and the transfer date for buy/sell matching purposes - which could lead to some very messy situations! Fortunately, the relevance of the original buy date disappeared along with taper relief in April 2008, and now only the transfer date is relevant to the transferee.)

Make the gift by a share transfer, not by selling the shares and giving the cash: the latter means that you realise the gain or loss yourself before the cash is transferred, rather than effectively transferring it along with the shares to your spouse.

Note that the gain or loss realised by your spouse is determined by the share price when your spouse sells them, not by the share price when they were transferred. So don't expect to be able to determine the perfect number of shares to transfer - just get something close, and if the price rises so that the gain is more than the CGT allowance, either sell somewhat fewer than all the shares to realise a lower gain, or accept paying a little bit of CGT on the excess gain. Also note that because the gain is realised when your spouse sells, it's not enough to get the transfer done this tax year, you've also got to get your spouse's sale done this tax year.

For the possible benefit of anyone else reading this: the special rule that makes all this work applies to civil partners as well as spouses. It does not apply in cases of legal separation, even when the spouses are not divorced and so still legally married (or the equivalent status for civil partners - I'm afraid I've forgotten the exact terminology). It also does not apply to 'partners' who are not in a legal marriage or civil partnership, no matter how long-established and secure their relationship. (Edit: for anyone confused by that last statement and MIATA's reply to Pedr01's question, the gift holdover relief described in the Helpsheet MIATA linked to is a different special rule to the one that applies to spouses and civil partners. It has a similar overall effect, though achieved in a somewhat different way technically, and it mainly depends on what the gift is rater than who it is given to. For gifts of shares, the shares have got to be shares in a trading company that counts as unlisted - and yes, that means that if AIM shares are made ISA-eligible by the simple technique of making them all count as listed, none of them will be eligible for gift holdover relief any longer...)

2 If over the course of a year, one made say 20 share transactions, is it the case that it is simply the overall profit that cannot exceed £10600 without incurring CGT?

Yes in all normal circumstances. But beware: there are cases when the overall profit doesn't exceed £10,600 and you've still got to account for CGT to the taxman. That accounting will produce an answer of £0 CGT owing, but it's still got to be done.

The main cases where that happens are:

A) If you want to make some CGT-related claim or election, because if you don't actually make the claim or election, you don't get it!

B) If the gains you've made on your profitable transactions are over £10,600 and need the losses on the loss-making transactions to bring the overall profit back below £10,600. This is really a special case of A) above, because there's a rule that the losses cannot be offset against the gains unless the losses have been claimed - so you need to make claims to get your CGT bill down to £0.

C) If the total "disposal proceeds" of your sales and other disposals are above £42,400 (four times the CGT allowance). The disposal proceeds of a sale are the raw price paid for the shares (or other asset) before deducting any selling expenses. For example, if you sell 1,000 shares at 200p each, paying your broker a £10 commission, the disposal proceeds are £2,000, not £1,990. The disposal proceeds of other disposals are determined similarly - for instance, on a gift transfer to your wife, your disposal proceeds are the total of your allowable costs.

If you're asked to fill in a tax return, you have to account for CGT in it in any of those three cases (and a couple of other ones relating to non-domicile that I cannot remember offhand) because the instructions for filling in a tax return say you do.

If you're not asked to fill in a tax return, you need to communicate with the taxman to tell him the situation in cases A) and B) for the reasons explained in those cases - and he will probably respond by asking you to fill in a tax return. In case C), however, I'm not aware of any reason why you need to communicate with the taxman about your CGT unless he asks you to fill in a tax return or one of the other cases also applies.

Finally, I say "in all normal circumstances" in the first paragraph of this section of the reply because there are some cases where a loss becomes 'clogged', meaning that it is only allowed to be used against some specific types of gain. The standard example is if you realise a loss on a disposal of an asset to a 'connected person' such as a close family member or a business partner: such losses can only be used against gains realised on disposals to the same connected person. If your overall gain is made up of £15k gains and £5k losses, so is £10k and under the CGT allowance, you normally offset the £5k losses against the £15k gains, leaving you with gains below the CGT allowance and so no CGT to pay. But if the £5k losses are 'clogged' and cannot be offset against any of the £15k gains, the CGT allowance only deals with £10,600 of those £15k gains, leaving you with CGT to pay on £4,400 of gains. So it is possible to end up with CGT to pay on overall profits under the CGT allowance - but it's distinctly unusual and requires special circumstances.

3 When will the 2013/14 CGT allowance be known and also the 2013/14 ISA allowance?

If the normal pattern is followed, I believe the 2013/2014 CGT allowance will be announced in the Budget later this month. If it rises in line with CPI as it is normally supposed to, the estimated figure I have seen is £11,000 - but I wouldn't be surprised if the Budget overruled that to freeze it at £10,600 again.

The 2013/2014 ISA allowance is already known to be £11,520 - see . It could presumably still be changed at the last minute in the Budget, but I wouldn't expect it to be.

Gengulphus

[gengulphus] 13/3/2013 17:22

david77   12 Mar'13 - 13:29 - 6686 of 6695   0 0

I doubt if we'll keep the IHT shelter if they allow AIM shares in ISAs - they'll want their pound of flesh in one way or another.

...

Arayan   12 Mar'13 - 17:26 - 6688 of 6695   0 0

ISA's aren't sheltered from IHT: ...

The IHT shelter that might be lost isn't to do with ISAs, but with AIM shares.

Specifically, unlisted shares in trading companies get 100% "business property relief" from IHT if they've been held for 2 years or more at the date of death, and being traded on AIM does not make a share count as listed. So AIM shares that are in trading companies and have no other reason to count as listed (in particular, are not officially listed on any foreign "recognised stock exchange") become IHT-sheltered after holding for two years.

The connection with ISAs is that the primary qualification for a share to be allowed in an ISA is that it counts as listed. So the easiest way for the law to be changed to allow AIM shares in ISAs is simply to make it that being traded on AIM does make a share count as listed. If it's done that way, an automatic side-effect will be that the IHT shelter stops applying to any AIM shares. And doing it that way would seem attractive for the government / taxman: as david77 suggests, it means they continue to get their pounds of flesh, just in death rather than in life...

For many of those currently using the IHT shelter, the loss of the IHT shelter is likely to outweigh the gain of the ISA shelter, because the IHT shelter is limited only by how much of your wealth you're willing to risk putting into AIM shares, while the ISA shelter is limited by the ISA allowance. Someone with a serious IHT problem is likely to have a 6+ figure sum to shelter from 40% IHT and a likely remaining lifespan of under 7 years, so a 5 figure sum their remaining ISA allowances can shelter from 28% CGT and say 1% of the sum per year Income Tax on dividends earned on it. Adding in the fact that CGT on many of the capital gains can be avoided simply by not selling before death, that adds up to a significantly lower tax rate on a significantly lower sum being saved by the ISA shelter than by the IHT shelter.

By the way, don't take the above as me arguing that AIM shares should not be allowed in ISAs, or that a more complicated way of allowing AIM shares in ISAs without them losing the IHT shelter should be used instead of making all AIM shares count as listed. Those are questions that I have very mixed feelings about and wouldn't currently want to argue either way. All I am saying is that if AIM shares are made ISA-eligible by the simple method of making them all count as listed, I expect there to be people who are highly displeased by the change as well as people who are pleased by it.

Gengulphus

[pedr01] 13/3/2013 14:43

Thank you ...

[pedr01] 13/3/2013 13:15

What if you gift to someone other than your spouse ... is gift relief still available, if so how do we claim it ... is there a form or do we just make a statement to the effect on the CGT return ?

[sandbag] 12/3/2013 22:14

david77,

I can confirm this is how it was last year when I gifted shares to my wife.

[zimbi] 12/3/2013 21:11

many thanks david

[david77] 12/3/2013 20:54

"1 Is it possible to give one's spouse £10600 worth of shares from a trading account?"

If you both have accounts with the same broker then the broker can move the shares from one account to the other. Phone them up and ask for advice. They will want a letter saying that you are gifting the shares to your wife. You should avoid the bid-offer spread and stamp duty that you would lose by selling and then buying back.

In you CGT return, you should show the disposal as a sale at your buying price - no loss and no gain, and your wife should show the shares as having been bought at the original buy date and price.

I am not an expert - with luck someone will confirm - or otherwise!

[zimbi] 12/3/2013 19:52

Some questions you will probably find extremely naive.

1 Is it possible to give one's spouse £10600 worth of shares from a trading account? How does this work? Do you simply sell shares to that value and then transfer the cash and then buy back the shares in her account? Is this transfer neutral in terms of CGT?

2 If over the course of a year, one made say 20 share transactions, is it the case that it is simply the overall profit that cannot exceed £10600 without incurring CGT?

3 When will the 2013/14 CGT allowance be known and also the 2013/14 ISA allowance?

[arayan] 12/3/2013 17:26

ISA's aren't sheltered from IHT:

"ISA investments form part of your estate for Inheritance Tax purposes."

[miata] 12/3/2013 14:43

If only it were just a pound.

[david77] 12/3/2013 13:29

I doubt if we'll keep the IHT shelter if they allow AIM shares in ISAs - they'll want their pound of flesh in one way or another.

[arayan] 12/3/2013 13:26

I guess we'll find out on the 20th March if AIM shares can be purchased within an ISA from April 6th?

There'll no doubt be loads of 'bed-and-ISA' deals going through in April if the chancellor doesn't do a u-turn.

[solsticefire] 10/3/2013 16:27

Thanks guys.

[bahtat] 09/3/2013 19:22

But remember that any valuation should preferably be from a 'Professional' as MIATA says.

i.e. FRICS, or MNAEA at the least. Not just a spotty young 'negotiator'. ;-)