Calling for volunteers - HMRC want your views on stipends

We have been contacted by HMRC policy team with the message below on the use of the stipends concession at universities. They are seeking volunteers to provide direct feedback on the use of Statement of Practice 4/86, the current concession threshold of £15,480 and how you use HMRC's current guidance (including where you might find it confusing). They've included a couple of questions in their email to focus the sessions.

As you'll see, they are planning to hold the 'immersion sessions' (Andrea's comment "get ready to be dunked") in March. If you would like to be involved (and I hope that lots of you do), please either let me know in the discussion below, or email me.

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Hi Julia,

Hope you are well

Thank you for speaking with us last year on Scholarship Income. It was helpful for us to hear some of the issues and concerns universities face, with regards to the Statement of Practice and the £15,480 threshold. We are planning to speak to a small number of universities to gain further insight into their understanding and interaction with the exemption (in ‘customer immersion sessions’). We hope these customer immersion sessions will take place in March. As BUFDG represent a number of universities and higher education establishments, I would like to check if you think this is something universities will be interested in. Our objective is to speak to customers providing Scholarship Income and understand their views on the exemption and their understanding of the rules.

We believe that the data from the immersion sessions will greatly help us to gauge how helpful users of the exemption find the guidance and give us some direction as to concerns/issues we would need to highlight to senior stakeholders to consider.

If you think this is helpful and some of the universities you represent would be happy to speak to us, please do let us know. We will be grateful if you would be able to help us identify the appropriate individuals in the Universities to speak to. If they are willing to speak to us, please do let me know and pass on their contact details. We can then reach out to them with some more information about the sessions. Ultimately, we plan to hold two customer immersion sessions and are looking for around 12 participants, so a list of about 20 participants would be ideal and allow us to account for any parties dropping out. The main focus of the immersion sessions will be the following areas; 

• Do universities use/understand the Statement of Practice or find it helpful? Do they know when they would need to engage with this?
• What records are kept to satisfy that a student is in receipt of genuine Scholarship Income? Does this change if the level of Scholarship Income exceeds £15,480? If so, what additional records are kept? At any point, is there/has there been any contact with HMRC with regards to awarding Scholarship Income?
• Do universities understand the conditions to meet the ‘relevant employment relationship’ criteria?

Is this something you would be able to help us with?