The first session of the IFP Accredited Financial Planning Firms conference today focused on the 'nuts and bolts' of VAT rulings.
The conference is being held at the Hilton London Kensington today exclusively for the IFP's 51 Accredited Financial Planning Firms.
First speaker Richard Stradling, associate director at Baker Tilly, spoke about VAT in financial services, a topic he also covered at last year's conference.
Speaking at whether the RDR had changed anything compared to last year, he said: "On the 1st January, we didn't hear a bang, it was all quiet on the Western front. I'm not sure that will remain though."
Regarding VAT, he said the challenge for HM Revenue and Customs over whether activities were VATable depended on whether an adviser's activities stopped when they recommended a product to a customer or stopped when the adviser acted between the product provider and customer to arrange a sale.
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Regarding VAT for international clients, Mr Stradling said if Financial Planners had clients outside the UK but inside the EU these were outside the scope of UK VAT.
However, clients outside the UK and the EU were also outside the scope of UK VAT but a proportion of the costs could still be recovered, a term known as partial exemption.
Other speakers at the full-day conference include Jamie Newell from IFA Solutions and Gillian Hepburn from Platform People.
In the afternoon there will be an extended round table Q&A session following feedback from last year's conference of how valuable the session was.
Financial Planner will be covering the conference all day with coverage on financialplanneronline.co.uk and tweets of sessions via our Twitter feed @FPM_Online. There will also be coverage in Financial Planner magazine.

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