Monthly Archives: March 2012

SEIS Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme

2012 Budget SEISAs promised the chancellor has confirmed in his March budget documents that there will be a Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) starting from 6th April 2012, although it didn’t get a mention in his actual speech.

Just to clarify for anyone confused by the similarity of SEIS with an existing scheme, there is already an Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) which targets larger businesses rather than start-ups.

This big brother to the SEIS also received good news in the budget, with the qualifying size of a company moving from a maximum gross asset size of £7 million with 50 employees, to £15 million with 250 employees. This means later stage investment prospects will now qualify for EIS (see EIS for more information).

The basic information that I covered on my last blog on the SEIS remains unchanged, so I won’t go over that again. Suffice to say it is worth ensuring that your new business qualifies (not all industries do – eg. Property development and financial services) and publicise to potential Investors that they can get tax relief by investing in your business.

Clearly for Investors it’s a no-brainer that you should utilise this new scheme for your investments.

So how do you make use of it?

Luckily those nice people at HMRC have put together a fairly comprehensive web-page that explains the SEIS and how to apply for it. See http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/seedeis/index.htm

They are careful to say that although the scheme starts on the 6th April, until the budget gets Royal Assent (around July) it isn’t set in stone, but it’s unlikely to alter in my view.

The HMRC web-pages have a section on how to get advance assurance that your business and the shares that you are going to issue to an Investor will qualify. It can be useful to do this in making your opportunity attractive.

 

SEIS Start-up Investment

Business InvestmentSEIS (Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme) is a new government incentive to help UK start-ups and young companies.

It starts in just a few weeks on April 6th, so now is a good time to start building this into your funding plan for your start-up. Or if you are an Investor, have a look to see if this will be applicable to the businesses into which you are investing.

There has been a similar incentive around for some time now (see EIS) but the SEIS is specifically targeting new companies.

The details will come out in the Chancellors budget speech next week (21st March), but these are the basic points:

  • The business must be new, or 2 years old or less, with fewer than 25 employees. It must have less than £200,000 of gross assets and not quoted on a stock market.
  • Directors or executives cannot use the scheme to invest in their own companies.
  • You can raise up to £150,000 of funding through the SEIS, but mustn’t have already raised any money under EIS or venture capital trust (VCT) schemes. This is in total not per year.

An Investor can have up to 30% of a share in the business under this scheme. The SEIS makes it attractive for an Investor to fund a start-up because of the number of tax reliefs that they would receive:

  1. Investors can claim back income-tax of 50% of the amount invested.
  2. An Investor can have a ‘capital gains tax holiday’. Capital gains tax (CGT) can be avoided on any asset sold during the financial year 2012-2013 as long as they reinvest the proceeds in a SEIS eligible start-up in the same year.
  3. The combined effect of the CGT holiday and the income tax break gives relief of up to 78% in the first year.

There is as you can imagine, a number of detail points that would need to be investigated but this should whet your appetite. It’s well worth while finding out more about the scheme either to make your new business attractive, or to maximise your investment returns.

After the chancellor has given final details next week, I’ll do a summary here and point you towards the required forms that the revenue will need to be completed.