On Friday 22 May, the Chancellor issued an updated Treasury Direction (“TD2”). You may recall that this is officially “the law” relating to the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme.
In theory, you would like to think, the separate HMRC guidance for employers and employees on the Scheme should reflect what is contained in the Direction, although to date there have been some inconsistencies between the two. Indeed, this appears to be part of the reason for the redraft (or at least an opportunity to pick up on some of these inconsistencies), as a number of the changes seem to have been made to ensure that TD2 is in line with more recent versions of HMRC’s guidance. The good news is that none of the changes appear to be hugely significant and the bad is that the drafting of the Direction is in parts hard to navigate and some points are regrettably (not to say unforgivably, after so many goes at it) still unclear.
