There's a query on Accountacy / Legal site about whether you can claim food as a tax deductable expense. My answer is below....
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Only if the food you've eaten is strictly for business purposes only. If the IR suspect that the food you ate was nutrionally sound enough to give you enough strength and energy for reacreational activity as well as your business activities, then this is unlikely to be tax deductable.
Items definitely vetoed by Gordo:
Mars Bars - The advertising slogan 'A Mars a Day helps you Work, Rest and Play' disqualifies them instantly.
Slim-a-soup or Weightwatchers food range - the IR deem these to be for personal use only because they help you lose weight and there is no proveable correlation that losing weight adds to the profitability of any IT business.
Items open to interpretation:
Cup-a-soup or Pot Noodle - because they contain no nutrients, Gordo could not conclusively claim during an IR enquiry that eating some would give you energy in your own time, but equally you couldn't prove that it did during business hours either. Therefore, eating them are taken as pointless recreational pursuits even when you are at work.
Tax deductable:
Chinese food - it fills you up instantly, gives you some energy, but then you're starving only a few hours later. Provided you can demonstrate with timed restaurant or take-away receipts that the meal was bought at breakfast or lunchtime and no later, it's a safe bet that's its allowable.
Crisps - provided you can demonstrate that you bought and consumed the item in the morning. They contain potato, so they do contain a few complex carbohydrates. The bag is so small, however, by the end of the working day any nutritional benefit would have worn off.
Useful tax dodge: Nutritional Avoidance
Some dubious umbrellas are encouraging contractors to use 'Nutritional Avoidance' to help contractors claim all the foods they eat as tax deductable. However, they must eat laxative chocolate and claim both the food and LC as tax deductable to play this loophole. These dodgy umbrellas claim that laxative chocolate taken after eating any food rids your body of any of the sustained nutrional benefits that could have carried over into recreational time.
However, safer brollies don't recommend it as it is not foolproof. This is because it has yet to be tested in the courts whether it is just the food normally eaten would be tax deductable or just the laxative chocolate used to rid the body of all foods eaten. Good accountants would equally claim that the IR would consider this 'nutritional evasion' rather than 'nutritional avoidance' and deem it a benefit-in-kind because the extra time spent on the toilet is a deliberate strategy that in no way can be deemed to increase the profitability of your business and therefore cannot be deemed a business expense.
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Only if the food you've eaten is strictly for business purposes only. If the IR suspect that the food you ate was nutrionally sound enough to give you enough strength and energy for reacreational activity as well as your business activities, then this is unlikely to be tax deductable.
Items definitely vetoed by Gordo:
Mars Bars - The advertising slogan 'A Mars a Day helps you Work, Rest and Play' disqualifies them instantly.
Slim-a-soup or Weightwatchers food range - the IR deem these to be for personal use only because they help you lose weight and there is no proveable correlation that losing weight adds to the profitability of any IT business.
Items open to interpretation:
Cup-a-soup or Pot Noodle - because they contain no nutrients, Gordo could not conclusively claim during an IR enquiry that eating some would give you energy in your own time, but equally you couldn't prove that it did during business hours either. Therefore, eating them are taken as pointless recreational pursuits even when you are at work.
Tax deductable:
Chinese food - it fills you up instantly, gives you some energy, but then you're starving only a few hours later. Provided you can demonstrate with timed restaurant or take-away receipts that the meal was bought at breakfast or lunchtime and no later, it's a safe bet that's its allowable.
Crisps - provided you can demonstrate that you bought and consumed the item in the morning. They contain potato, so they do contain a few complex carbohydrates. The bag is so small, however, by the end of the working day any nutritional benefit would have worn off.
Useful tax dodge: Nutritional Avoidance
Some dubious umbrellas are encouraging contractors to use 'Nutritional Avoidance' to help contractors claim all the foods they eat as tax deductable. However, they must eat laxative chocolate and claim both the food and LC as tax deductable to play this loophole. These dodgy umbrellas claim that laxative chocolate taken after eating any food rids your body of any of the sustained nutrional benefits that could have carried over into recreational time.
However, safer brollies don't recommend it as it is not foolproof. This is because it has yet to be tested in the courts whether it is just the food normally eaten would be tax deductable or just the laxative chocolate used to rid the body of all foods eaten. Good accountants would equally claim that the IR would consider this 'nutritional evasion' rather than 'nutritional avoidance' and deem it a benefit-in-kind because the extra time spent on the toilet is a deliberate strategy that in no way can be deemed to increase the profitability of your business and therefore cannot be deemed a business expense.
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