Austrian Alpine Club (UK) Ltd

Insurance Premium Tax Evasion

The proof that IPT is a legal requirement

The Austrian Alpine Club (UK) Ltd is a UK PLC and must therefore comply with all of the taxation laws which apply to UK PLCs.
Our UK PLC is owned and managed by our members, whom we define as those joining the AAC(UK) Ltd by paying our annual membership subscription. Our Club is definitely not owned by our parent body, the Österreichischer Alpenverein (ÖAV).
Worldwide Mountain Rescue, Medical and Repatriation insurance without age limit has always been included in our Club’s membership package for no extra charge. Evidence that most of our members join principally to obtain this insurance was proved in the 2011 Membership Survey.
The 1994 Finance Act introduced taxation on all insurance products sold to UK residents by UK bodies. If a principal reason for anyone joining our Club is to obtain any form of insurance that is included for no extra charge in our membership package, then Insurance Premium Tax (IPT) is levied on the whole of the subscriptions received from all UK residents and it must be remitted by the club on the day of receipt to His Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC).
If it is remitted late, it always results in simple interest being charged at 2.75% per day.
The current IPT rate is 20% for Travel Insurance and 12% for other insurance products, and no insurance products are exempt. Ours is obviously Travel Insurance, since Mountain Rescue and Medical Services are provided free of charge in the UK, so are only needed if we are abroad, and Repatriation isn't needed if we haven't left the UK.
Despite what you have been told, you do NOT need the advice of an expert, you just need to be capable of opening the HMRC website and understanding clear unambiguous English to learn that this is correct. Mike Garrett's claim that the advice of a (necessarily unidentified) expert had been sought and that he had assured us that we have no IPT liability, was essential to stop us checking for ourselves and learning the truth. The unidentified expert, if there ever was one, had obviously been given a deliberately false account of our true situation.

Stemming potential false claims

We have to provide our members with the standard Österreichischer Alpenverein (ÖAV) Membership Cards to enable us to prove our entitlement to "Members' Rights" at Alpine mountain huts.

It is not the ÖAV that is selling membership to our members. Our Articles of Association assert that: “The Company is a member of the Österreichischer Alpenverein, as a section of that body, whilst being an independent entity", and it is our independent entity which is selling our independent entity’s membership package to our members. Our UK PLC's annual payment to the ÖAV of their share of our collected membership subscriptions correctly appears in our annual accounts as “expenditure”, confirming that we are buying the insurance from the ÖAV and that we ourselves are marketing it to our members.

How much do we owe?

There seems little point in not simplifying the late payment charge arithmetic by assuming that each year’s subscriptions were not received until the end of that year, since our total debt cannot possibly be paid anyway. Anyone claiming to have read this webpage must be able to prove it by quoting the word ‘Scafell’.

Our Club’s website currently publishes UK-resident subscription data only for the years 2017 to 2022. For just those 6 of the 29 years since IPT was introduced, the Club owes HMRC £423,471.60 in evaded tax, and by the end of 2024 it will owe a late payment charge of almost £24M. The late payment charge for all of the 29 years will undoubtedly amount to quite a few hundred million pounds. Had I access to the number of UK residents who were members in each year since the 1994 Finance Act came into force, I would immediately update the following table and then promptly replace this lengthy paragraph with a much shorter one merely summarising the IPT debt and outstanding Late Payment Charge. If you have the figures and share them with me, please, your identity will not be disclosed.

Subs Year	Travel IPT Rate	Subsriptions from UK Residents	IPT Owed	Years Multiplier	Days in the Year	Daily IPT Interest	Late Payment Interest	Late Payment Interest Multiplier
A	B	C	D=B*C	E	F	G	H=DEF*G	I=EFG
1995	0.025	?		29	365	2.75%		291.0875
1996	0.025	?		28	366	2.75%		281.82
1997	0.025	?		27	365	2.75%		271.0125
1998	0.175	?		26	365	2.75%		260.975
1999	0.175	?		25	365	2.75%		250.9375
2000	0.175	?		24	366	2.75%		241,56
2001	0.175	?		23	365	2.75%		230.8625
2002	0.175	?		22	365	2.75%		220.825
2003	0.175	?		21	365	2.75%		210.7875
2004	0.175	?		20	366	2.75%		201.3
2005	0.175	?		19	365	2.75%		190.7125
2006	0.175	?		18	365	2.75%		180.675
2007	0.175	?		17	365	2.75%		170,6375
2008	0.175	?		16	366	2.75%		160.04
2009	0.175	?		15	365	2.75%		150.5625
2010	0.175	?		14	365	2.75%		140.525
2011	0.200	?		13	365	2.75%		130.4875
2012	0.200	?		12	366	2.75%		120.78
2013	0.200	?		11	365	2.75%		110.4125
2014	0.200	?		10	365	2.75%		100.375
2015	0.200	?		9	365	2.75%		90.3375
2016	0.200	?		8	366	2.75%		80.52
2017	0.200	366,983	73,396.60	7	365	2.75%	4,297,524
2018	0.200	402,165	80,433.00	6	365	2.75%	4,036,731
2019	0.200	423,631	84,726.20	5	365	2.75%	3,543,497
2020	0.200	350,361	70,072.20	4	366	2.75%	2,350,922
2021	0.200	199,057	39,811.40	3	365	2.75%	999.017
2022	0.200	375,161	75,032.20	2	365	2.75%	1,255,230
2023	0.200	?		1	365	2.75%		10.0375

	TOTALS		423,471.60				16,482,921

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