Cobham Life Tax Conference 2013

I was at the National Life Tax conference last week.  I won't try and cover the whole conference in the blog but just a couple of themes that emerged.

1.  There was quite a lot of coverage of topics other than corporation tax.  A FATCA/FTT talk, a session on the FCA , a lot on changes to qualifying policies in the Finance Bill 2013 session and  the customary VAT slot.  This is a reflection of the fact that FB 2013 doesn't include any specific legislation on the corporate taxation of life insurers but also perhaps a sign of the areas that large life insurers are looking at and where the big four see their future fees coming from.

2.  It seems that things that I thought had gone away for good are now making a comeback.  A really good example of this is the Andersen case and outsourcing where the UK Government is looking to implement the ECJ decision.  There's a little bit of background on this in the minutes of the IPT and VAT Insurance Liaison Group meeting on the 8th February 2013. (Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be on HMRC's website but there is a copy on the ILAG website).  Another zombie issue is insurance contracts IFRS 4 phase 2.  Kevin Griffith of EY did a good talk on this that pointed out that the IASB's insurance accounting project has been going since 1997.  Sadly it seems that progress is being made with a targeted exposure draft due in June 2013.  Having said that Kevin's slides show an implementation date for IFRS 2 phase 4 of 1 Jan 2018 so not exactly imminent.

There was an interesting discussion on the Wednesday evening with tax directors from Prudential, L&G, LBG and Aviva.  One question that was asked was whether the next step was the abolition of I-E.  I think all of the panel thought that I-E should remain for the short to medium term with the quickest suggested date for implementation being 7 years from now.  So this is one Zombie that won't be coming back from the dead for a while.