Government pronouncements on saving for old age always include advice to save via a pension fund, the logic presumably being that these will be regular savings enabling individuals to build a pot of money that will see them through their years of retirement.

But if you’re in the private sector, where the only schemes available to you are money purchase schemes, is this advice sound?  Ignore for a moment how funds have ...

Behind the Cloud is a book written by Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com that provides advice to help entrepreneurs become more successful.

You can hear what Mark Benioff says of the book in the video below, but for the typical SME is it worth the read? 

For the most part the book is a success.  The book is a very easy read and keeps the content to short sections of advice divided up into 111 "plays". ...

HM Revenue & Customs have announced the details of the New Disclosure Opportunity (NDO).  The NDO was foreshadowed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Budget in April this year and although certain details of the scheme had become public knowledge in the last couple of months, HMRC has not formally published the details until now.

The NDO is a rerun of the Offshore Disclosure Facility (ODF) which was available in 2007.&...

At last!  VAT, that great pan-European tax, is coming of age.

If you are a VAT-registered business the principle has always been that input VAT you suffer should be recoverable, regardless of where it's incurred.  But most businesses have found the process of reclaiming VAT suffered outside the territory in which they're registered an absolute nightmare.  For a UK-registered trader to recover VAT from Italy, or Germany...

Those of us in the private sector often look on jealously at the generous final salary pensions of our civil servant cousins, but will the proposed withdrawal of the higher rate pension relief from April 2011 leave high earning civil servants with a bit of a nasty shock in the form of a tax bill for the higher rate relief claw backs on their pension funds. I’m no actuary, but the value of a personal pension fund would need to be in the region of...