Three things your client may call you about this week ...

Tax adviser who dodged stamp duty on his own home

A tax adviser who avoided paying thousands of pounds in stamp duty on his own home has been fined £60,000 for failing to warn a client that the taxman was clamping down on a similar tax avoidance scheme, according to The Sunday Times.

David Hannah, 59, who runs Leicestershire tax advice firm Cornerstone, was found by a judge last year to have avoided paying £30,600 in stamp duty on a £765,000 home in the East Midlands. He had participated in a complex overseas-based annuities scheme that misrepresented the house's value as £38,250 to the taxman.

Last week it emerged that Hannah was told to pay nearly £60,000 in penalties, fines and court costs after the Taxation Disciplinary Board found that he had downplayed the risks of a stamp duty avoidance scheme to a client — advice that he admitted repeating for "up to 40 or 50 clients each week".

Hannah was found to have broken professional rules by failing to highlight that the scheme, which involved property buyers setting up unlimited companies to buy houses so that they could disguise their true value, had been "expressly targeted by HMRC" for tax avoidance investigation from December 2006 onwards.

Cornerstone said that the latest hearing arose from a "single complainant over a risk warning given 13 years ago, and it is disappointing given the relatively minor nature of their findings, that the tax disciplinary board chose to hear a case that was outside its normal two-year time remit, by a full 11 years."

HMRC said: "Most avoidance schemes simply don't work."

'Bank of Mum and Dad' lending to surge by £700m as post-Covid market shuns first-time buyers

The estate agency Savills is predicting lending by the bank of mum and dad is going to have to further increase to help young people onto the housing market as a result of the pandemic.

In The Telegraph, the business predicts a 14% increase in lending from parents - an extra £700m in the year 2021. It also estimates more than 150,000 first time buyers will receive parental financial assistance in 2022, a new high since the 149,000 of 2017.

The need for the bank of mum and dad to provide more support after a crash was evidenced after the global financial crisis when family help for buyers rose 76% between 2007 and 2009.

We're putting more away, but getting little in return

Savers put away £57bn during the first three months of lockdown, but earned little in interest as their money was hit with bigger rate cuts than at any point in the past decade, The Sunday Times reports.

Britons put about £14.3bn into savings accounts in March, £16.7bn in April and a record £25.6bn in May — more than five times the average £5bn a month that was saved last year, according to the Bank of England.

In May, £9.1bn of the savings made were stashed in accounts, usually current accounts, that earned no interest at all. Hargreaves Lansdown wealth manager Sarah Coles says: "For many people the savings have been the silver lining on the Covid cloud.

"Unfortunately most of this cash ends up languishing in easy-access accounts with high-street giants, where they're earning a miserable rate."

A series of cuts to the base rate by the Bank of England to boost people's spending, on top of a decade of low interest rates, have left banks struggling to offer customers much incentive to save.

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