We’ve just been granted a £10 per day meal allowance but have to provide a receipt or no payment.
The rules are it must be a savoury item of at least £1 or more and must be spent within your shift hours.
We are quite a new small container firm who are mainly trampers.
These rules sound like ■■■■■■■■■ to me. I’ve worked for the 2 biggest players on boxes and both don’t ask for receipts they just stipulate you must have worked 10 hours that day.
Who’s right and who’s wrong? Cheers
£10 sounds like it is essentially for two meals. Make it work for you. You will obviously have to make two stops during the day and these things ain’t easy to find parking for. The cost of you going out of your way to stop will be more than the £10, but hey it’s their rules right?
The meal allowance may be part of your pay deal, but it isnt a legal obligation for all employers to offer such. The company can ask for receipts if they so choose. . Different things could be happening. An employer might pay you £12.50 for being away from base, and choose to count that as wages and so pay tax on that. You get £10. Doesnt sound like this is the case here.
An employer might pay you £10 tax free for meals. Couple of scenarios:
They might have previously spoken to the local tax office, who agree that it is a continuing genuine expense, and say they wont ask for proof in form of receipts. They may not have any agreement with tax office, so will need to have receipts available to prove it is a legitimate expense, not disguised pay. The tax office will want to check drivers arent getting £10 tax free when still at base, as disguised pay.
Nothing wrong at all in a company asking for receipts. If nothing else they are covering their arses, and are paying something they aren`t legally obliged to.
End of the day, you are £10 better off by keeping receipts.
In order to keep HMRC happy, if they are paying such allowances tax-free the employer is obliged to have some checks in place to show that expenses are actually being incurred along the lines of the allowance being paid, and that the relevant rules regarding being away from base etc are being complied with. The easiest way to do this is to require dated receipts showing expenditure of a couple of quid for food.
SuperMultiBlue:
These rules sound like [zb] to me. I’ve worked for the 2 biggest players on boxes and both don’t ask for receipts they just stipulate you must have worked 10 hours that day.Who’s right and who’s wrong? Cheers
When claiming as an individual HMRC require proof of purchase in order to get the subsistence allowance. Those two companies, along with Stobarts may have an agreement with HMRC that HMRC wouldn’t do with smaller companies or smaller companies wouldn’t apply for.
So at the moment unless your employer gets an agreement with HMRC your employer is right that you’ll need to provide proof of purchase.
My understanding is that if the employer wants to make payments free of tax with regard to subsistence, it only needs to make sure of qualifying travel being undertaken. With regard to meal allowances this is that the journey took the qualifying length of time and probably most likely that a return to base was not made during the day, which may split the day up into 2 or more journeys. The above came into effect as of 6 April 2019.
Of course the o/p doesn’t give enough information to know if the company is actually paying the expenses or just taking some of the wage out of tax.
As for the minimum £1 and the savoury rule, this may be company policy.
The £10 doesn’t appear to be above the industry scale rate for a 10 hour shift, so there doesn’t seem to be a need for a bespoke arrangement.
Happy to be corrected on all of this. As I have said before, I have submitted expenses myself via a tax return and taken a large sum out of tax before (it adds up over the year). If you have records you can back-date claims around 4 years I believe. Most of the reaction I get on here is that it is not possible or is not true. However, yes, you could claim back a few hundred at least probably, in the right circumstances.
LOL. As usual it appears you need to be almost eyeball permanently welded to the HMRCs entire book in order to keep up to date.
Whilst we all may be able to start banging in a P87, personally for the extra £3-£4 a week it’d put in my pocket I think I’ll pass. To keep records happy enough to keep HMRC happy it’d take me longer than the 10-15 minutes a week it’d take me to earn that at my normal hourly rate. Now if my employer were to shove an extra tax free £5-£10 a day in my wages well that’s a different story but somehow I don’t see that happening.
Tax dodgers
So you get 10 a day meal allowance as long as you provide a recipet for something savoury over a pound…
In which case just spend a pound on a suasge roll and pocket the £9. Change .
Who cares if it’s legal not your problem
edd1974:
Who cares if it’s legal not your problem
Actually it is. They won’t go after your employer for the tax owed, they’ll go after you. Your personal tax is your responsibility to ensure the correct amount has been paid, not your employers.
I worked for a firm that introduced a £10 a day tax fee meal allowance and reduced my hourly rate by £1.20 an hour. This meant that if I worked more than ten paid hours per day I lost money, ie basic and overtime rates were both reduced.
My outfit have paid £10 a day tax free for donkeys years, don’t have to provide receipts. My gut says it’s a bit dodgy but I don’t worry about it. They are a big outfit.
Don’t Stobarts still pay £15per day tax free?
Evolved:
Tax dodgers
I hope you make a substantial charitable donation to the tax authorities every year in addition to your legally required taxes!
This is tax avoidance = Legal
Not tax evasion = illegal
(I do realise you were just making a funny comment [emoji57])
I was paid £15 meal allowance for years and never put in 1 receipt , pity they didn’t pay the full wage as a meal allowance at it would of all been tax free