Is the withholding of funding notice allowed? I run an independent business. The nature of my job means that I rely on annual funding from various organisations in order to keep a steady income. One organisation in particular, on which I’ve relied for a significant chunk of my annual income for the past ten years or so, have not yet told me if they will be funding me this year. I inquired about this 11 months ago and we have been in ongoing contact about it since then. My question here isn’t about them funding me or not. It’s the fact that I have had to wait so long to receive conformation of anything; surely this breaks some code of conduct? I am being kept in the dark about whether I will receive the money that I need to stay alive.
If two parties have a contract, where one party is required to do X in exchange for the other party doing Y, then the terms specified in that contract would determine what happens. You would have to see exactly what it says, especially if the other party has the option to not give you money. A contract might say "A shall at his option give B $5,000 by date X; if A elects not to make payment, notice must be given 60 days before X". Failing to give timely notice is thus breech of contract. However if the clause only says "A shall at his option give B $5,000 by date X", then there is no requirement for advance notice. And this assumes that there is a contract whereby both parties have some obligation to the other. A gift, on the other hand, carries no obligations on the giving party. There may be some social code to the effect that they should have told you by now, but failing to give advance notice is at most rude and certainly not legally actionable.
Being outside of IR35 means one is considered a (self-employed) contractor, not an employee, and as such will not have income tax and national insurance contributions deducted under PAYE. HMRC require the NINO and Ltd Co details to cross-reference the payments declared in the public sector's accounts with the Ltd Co's accounts to ensure (a) they match, (b) the correct tax and NIC is paid by the relevant entities, and (c) to confirm the identity and/or status in the Ltd Co of the recipient of the payments.
No, it's not legal. The General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) apply given that you are in the UK (regardless of where the Data Processor is based). The UK GDPR is slightly modified due to Brexit, but the same principles apply. The only plausible legal basis for this actions would be that you consent to it, and you're entitled to withdraw that consent at any time. Some may claim that Article 6.1(b) applies, i.e. that it's necessary to send marketing email in order to fulfil the contract, but GDPR is clear that bundling such consent into a contract for service simply to permit the data processor additional actions isn't allowed, as I'll demonstrate. UK GDPR requires that consent to use your personal information (in this case, your email address) for the stated purpose be freely given. Consent to use your information for direct marketing is not freely given if it's inseparable from the consent to use it for some other service, as per para 43: Consent is presumed not to be freely given if it does not allow separate consent to be given to different personal data processing operations despite it being appropriate in the individual case, or if the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is dependent on the consent despite such consent not being necessary for such performance. And Article 7.4 backs this up with When assessing whether consent is freely given, utmost account shall be taken of whether, inter alia, the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is conditional on consent to the processing of personal data that is not necessary for the performance of that contract. The intent of Article 6.1(b) is that only the processing required for the service you have bought is allowed (e.g. if you supply your address for delivery of stuff you've bought, the data processor can use that address to send you the stuff, but is not allowed to add a contract term that allows them to send you unwanted stuff). Examples of emails that Article 6.1(b) would allow (in my assessment) include things such as notification of upcoming downtime, or a reminder that subscriptions are due, but not unsolicited advertisements for other products. There's a grey area that's open to interpretation, where adverts are piggybacked onto actual service messages.
Summarized from Kickstarter's Q &amp; A: You are executing a project where you are paid by people to deliver a defined outcome at a defined deadline. And the terms of Kickstarter make it clear that it is your legal obligation to deliver as promised (see Your responsibility). In order to deliver you need to pay for your bill of material, your processing cost, your working time (this is your salary), shipping, a Kickstart fee, maybe office space and so on. Considering all this cost, you define the minimum amount of money you need and set this as your target (see in more detail What should I consider when setting my funding goal?). The salary is dependent on you how much money you want to pay yourself (so you more or less define it). I guess one would pay oneself a typical salary as also paid in a comparable industry. In case you collect a lot more than you expected, you might reinvest, improve your product or you can also make a profit (see in more detail What happens when a project is overfunded?). This means you could pay yourself an accordingly higher salary. After you paid yourself a salary, you have to pay tax on the salary. The details are dependent on the country where you live, but this is generally how it works.
Your boss is totally wrong. Legally, there is no such thing as a "probation period" in the UK. You have the right to your holiday payment, according to the days that you worked. What can happen: The legal minimum is I think 28 days per year including bank holidays, but most companies give 23 or 24 days PLUS eight days bank holiday. Your contract may say that the first three months are called probation period, and during that time you only get the legal minimum, and after that the much more common higher amount. That would be legal. But even so, you would be entitled to seven days, minus any bank holidays where you didn't work.
The company pays you a salary A. They need to withhold some amount B of that to give to the IRS. Now, if they pay you only C and withhold amount D that is based on that amount, and then make a separate tax-deductible donation E, that means the IRS does get not only an amount D that is smaller than B, but also the company can deduct E (in part) from their own taxes. As a result, that sounds like tax evasion on the face. However, if they still pay you A, withhold B (the tax on the whole amount), and payout C to you as well as the donation as part of your salary, that could possibly be a legal way - though you might want to consult your tax consultant.
One set of disclosures would be those necessary to comply with anti-money laundering, counter-terrorism financing regulations, and international sanctions laws (e.g. related to the Ukraine war). Involvement as an agent who is subject to these restrictions would still be something that the firm needs to rule out. Another might be compliance with &quot;know your customer&quot; laws which are a bit tricky because the POA agent is only the &quot;customer&quot; in a partial and limited sense. On one hand, the law wants to avoid exploitation of a vulnerable POA agent to the detriment of the principal by knowing the agent's level of financial sophistication, risk tolerance, and investment goals. On the other hand, ultimately it is the principal's finances that are at stake. The disclosures described in the question seem to be questions related to accredited investor status, and it isn't clear that the POA agent needs to financially meet the requirements for accredited investor status.
There are two cases to distinguish: information that the other party does not want to give without court order, and information that the other party may not give without court order. Only the former case matters, of course, since the latter by definition requires a court order. So, if the other party is legally capable of giving the information, but it's commercially not sensible for them, then you'll need to sweeten the deal. And that's business, not a legal question anymore. In other words: there's no legal instrument that's at the same time equal to a court order but also different from one. When you need a court order, there's no alternative to a court order.