Peter Vaines explains why it’s all about residence…
The case of Mr Gaines-Cooper reached the Supreme Court this month. In case you have been away for a while on Voyager, the issue here is whether Mr Gaines-Cooper should properly be regarded as not resident on the grounds that he satisfied the terms of the long standing Inland Revenue practice set out in their booklet IR20.
Mr Gaines-Cooper left the UK in 1976 to live abroad. He wrote to HMRC and after four years they wrote to him enquiring about the number of days he had spent in the UK. He gave them the details which showed he was comfortably below the 91 day limit for these years. He thought nothing more about it because as everybody knew, that was the practice in establishing non-residence. You leave the UK and do not return for more than 90 days each year and under the HMRC practice you were treated as non-resident.
Twenty years later HMRC decided to tax Mr Gaines-Cooper on the basis that he was UK resident. They explained to everybody that we had completely misunderstood
