Buying property first time - HELP/advice needed :(

DVardysShadow

No need to make a meal of it. The answer is 'savings'.

joe7777

if i dont declare tax on this "grey" area of domain sale... is it likely i'll get caught?

Running_Horse

No offence, but you sound dodgier every time you post. Pay an accountant a small sum to advise you of your liability. It'll be cheaper and less risky in the long run. Whatever you do, don't trust reassurances of people on an anonymous message board. They are not the ones taking the risk.

_Andy_

I see telling the truth is now passe and fraud is the 'in thing' on these boards. Shame on those nasty solicitors daring to adhere to money laundering requirements.

berec1

I am not currently a practising English solicitor but work in a specialist legal role within a law firm and so receive money laundering reminders on a ridiculously regular basis. Money laundering regulations are not something any solicitor can risk ignoring - if our lawyers fail to follow regulations by not performing customer due diligence, not enquiring into the source of funds if necessary, or not keeping accurate records of the checks they carried out, they face an unlimited fine or the potential for up to 2 years' imprisonment.

To put it simply: if you decide to tell the solicitor that your funds resulted from an inheritance, what will you do if the solicitors' firm asks for the paper trail that proves this - which they may well do given the large transaction and need to satisfy themselves that large sums have not come from money laundering? Presumably you will admit that you mislead them.

Congratulations. The solicitor is now in a situation where their client has been evasive as to the source of a large amount of money that they are planning to use in a transaction and has been shown to have lied at least once to the solicitor. In the majority of solicitors firms, such a situation is likely to result in the firm making a disclosure to the Serious Organised Crime Agency of a possibly suspicious transaction as per the requirements of the money laundering regulations - if they do not do so they face severe penalties if you turned out to be engaged in such activity.

SOCA - and no doubt the Inland Revenue and any other official body that fancies a nosy - will then look into the situation to check whether you are laundering money. Although their conclusion may be that you have not laundered money, you will now be in a far worse position as everybody knows about your finances. Highly unlikely the Revenue would take a "softly, softly" approach with you at that stage.

If you need further convincing, can I suggest you spend some time reading through

http://www.lawsociety.org.uk/productsandservices/practicenotes/aml.page
particularly http://www.lawsociety.org.uk/productsandservices/practicenotes/aml/463.article#h11fundmeth (remembering that assessing the validity of a client's explanation may include requesting paperwork to support said explanation)

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/MLR/

Hopefully this might get across to you the risks in saying what you are thinking of saying to a solicitor... :eek:

poppysarah

pjcox2005 wrote: »

I assume as you say its a grey area, you've approached HMRC to discuss and ask for guidance on how it should be taxed?

Apart from that I would agree with other posters that you should just tell your solicitior that the funds have arisen through the sale of a website, as they are quite important checks for them to carry out.

Yes the buying and selling of a domain name must be seen as business.... can't imagine what else it'd be classed as. Unless it was your personal domain and you've sold it to your name-a-like someone famous...