Introduce a company secretary to a 2 year old Limited company with no secretary.

[eliquant]

I've been the director of my Limited Company for nearly 2 years but during its incorporation I decided that I was to have no company secretary.

Would it be possible to introduce a new company secretary to the company ? how difficult would this be ? what form of wages would I be able to pay to this secretary e.g. wages / dividends. ? Would that secretary then have to provide a Self Assessment to HMRC every year if ,say, she is in part time employment at the moment.

[Mr.Whippy]

I've been the director of my Limited Company for nearly 2 years but during its incorporation I decided that I was to have no company secretary.

Would it be possible to introduce a new company secretary to the company ? how difficult would this be ? what form of wages would I be able to pay to this secretary e.g. wages / dividends. ? Would that secretary then have to provide a Self Assessment to HMRC every year if ,say, she is in part time employment at the moment.

To appoint a secretary fill in form 288a for Companies House

Form 288a

[Wanderer]

what form of wages would I be able to pay to this secretary e.g. wages / dividends. ? Would that secretary then have to provide a Self Assessment to HMRC every year if ,say, she is in part time employment at the moment.

If you are the company director then your company can pay a salary to anyone they like. If the company has multiple shareholders then it pays divdends to it's shareholders in proportion to how many shares they hold. If two people own 1 share each then you each get half the dividends.

Note that a secretary (and director) have special rights and obligations under law. You don't have to be director or secretary to get a salary or hold shares in the company. Appointing another director or secretary is easy, getting them to resign might be a completely different matter, especially if they decide not to co-operate. I think you can have different classes of shares and pay different amounts too. It really is best to speak to an accountant to figure out the exact details because if you do the wrong thing there can be serious consequences.

To pay someone a salary, the Inland Revenue may want to see that this person actually does some work for the company rather than just take a salary because they have no other income and you are avoiding tax. The other thing is that if you had (say) 100k in cash retained in the company, you might not be able to sell someone a 50% share in the company for 1 pound and then split the 100 grand dividend between you. For some reason the Inland Revenue don't like this.

If you are considering income splitting then you have to consider the implications of S660a and the Settlements legislation. There was also a test case with Artic Systems where they tried and failed to stop a husband and wife company from income splitting. Do a search on the underlined terms to find out more.

Good luck!

[northernladuk]

Good post from Wanderer. We could give you much better feedback if you told us why you want to do this.

[Alan @ BroomeAffinity]

Is it possible the OP is confusing Company Secretary and just a secretary?

Mr Whippy, form 288a is obsolete now. Its now AP03