ASSOCIATION of Teachers and Lecturers President Hank Roberts yesterday condemned as ‘outrageous’ an offshore company employing thousands of supply teachers avoiding the payment of millions of pounds in employer’s National Insurance contributions.
The Sark-based International Subcontracting Solutions Ltd (ISS) employs more than 24,000 temporary agency workers across the UK, most of them working as supply teachers.
HM Revenue & Customs says schools, councils or employment agencies could be liable for the shortfall in contributions.
Roberts said: ‘This is something that is outrageous and all the teacher unions should be fighting together tooth and nail to oppose it.’
Roberts added: ‘Tory Party treasurer Lord Stanley Fink has said that the whole of Britain should become one big tax haven.
‘The Tories’ aim is a regressive system where taxation is simply raised by taxes on goods and services and where less and less is provided by the state for services such as education.’
ISS is a payroll company which pays the salaries and expenses of workers who find jobs through recruitment agencies in the UK.
The arrangement means that temporary workers, such as supply teachers, are the employees of ISS.
Because ISS is based offshore it does not pay employer’s National Insurance contributions, and neither do the UK-based recruitment agencies that find the jobs for staff paid by ISS.
Consultancy firm Professional Passport, which advises the recruitment industry on tax issues, says a lack of enforcement has encouraged the growth of offshore umbrella companies.
• British banks will have to raise tens of billions of pounds in fresh capital as a result of new accounting rules due to be announced early in the new year.
Banks including Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland will require extra capital to meet the new standards.
The International Accounting Standards Board is set to publish the new rules in the first quarter of 2013.
Recent stress-testing by major UK banks found that, based on these new rules, provisions for losses on bad loans would have to increase between 30 per cent and 100 per cent.
Bank of England figures show that currently they set aside £35bn of provisions for their UK exposures alone.
The new proposals mean that the government will have to put more public money into the big banks.
