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Employment Income: Scope |
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She had separate contracts for each play and wireless appearance. She also recorded for the gramophone and had appeared in a play on Broadway, New York. Since the performance in New York was completely outside the UK, she argued that it was an employment and, as such, that she would be taxable at that time only on such sums, if any, as she remitted to the UK. The Revenue argued that this was merely one engagement in her profession as an actress, a profession carried on inside and outside the UK, so that she was taxable on an arising basis under schedule D, case II. The Revenue won. Rowlatt J said:51 |
"Where one finds a method of earning a livelihood which does not contemplate the obtaining of a post and staying in it, but essentially contemplates a series of engagements and moving from one to the other … then each of those engagements could not be considered an employment, but is a mere engagement in the course of exercising a profession, and every profession and every trade does involve the making of successive engagements and successive contracts and, in one sense of the word, employments." |
The second approach is totally different. In Fall v Hitchen52 a professional ballet dancer was held to be liable to tax under schedule E in respect of a contract with one particular company because that contract, looked at in isolation, was one of service and not one for services. Pennycuick V-C held that this concluded the matter.53 This is quite different from Rowlatt J who had started with the general scheme of the taxpayer’s earnings and then asked where the particular contract fitted in. In Davies v Braithwaite itself no one seems to have asked whether the contract was one of service or one for services.54 |