BALPA mambers indeed! What on earth are you two doing in BALPA if this is your attitude? Your bitterness seems to have clouded your judgement. Forgive me for assuming you were not members. Nothing you have written suggests otherwise.
Cashing in? No no no, you've clearly not read either my post above or BALPA's. BALPA is not charging anyone for anything, so haw can they be "cashing in?" They have given you (us) considered expert ADVICE for free that, if you chose to believe it (and why shouldn't you) will save you the fine for non payment of tax due plus the bill from some another accountant who would have you believe otherwise. That sou ds like a considerable saving to me. Even if the other accountants are correct and BALPA is not, then you will get a rebate on the tax you've paid in error, so BALPA will still have saved you the accountant's fee.
The savings are therefore plainly obvious to anyone who choses to open his eyes to see them...
"Other people have found out ...suddenly interested...". You can hardly expect a firm of independant city tax experts to run a permanent investigation into the tax affairs of every BALPA member in the hope that they might find a loophole, can you? Thats hardly feasible, so why grump about it? BALPA took action soon enough when members alerted it to the possibility of a loophole, and did so in a way to save the members the cost of paying a very high accountants fee on a matter that was far from certain, and that the tax advisers have since said is not valid. Sounds like a pretty good service to me.
As BALPA charged nothing for this advice I'd say it is pretty clear who was "cashing in" on this business, and all the more so as there are potentially hundreds of clients with identical simple claims that would take minurtes each to process, and that we now find was (subject to the IR's acceptance) based on an incorrect premise anyway. Thats a lot of money for a lot of people to pay for a mistake, if that is what is eventually proved.
No. BALPA has done all a thoroughly good favour with this, and saved us a lot of money into the bargain, for a ZERO financial benefit to themselves.
Cashing in my @rse!