Readers’ forum: Furlough fandango

I recently saw an interesting video by Martin Lewis (tinyurl.com/ws2je7o) on one-man or one-woman limited companies. Having explained that dividends could not be taken into account under the coronavirus job retention scheme he confirmed that a director could furlough themselves and receive 80% of their salary under PAYE up to the standard maximum £2 500 for three (now four) months; so far so good.

Mr Lewis then confirmed that a furloughed director could perform their normal statutory duties as a director without breaching the non-working rule but must not earn money. The interesting point was that as he explained it the rule on not earning applied only to the director’s role in relation to the company. Thus there was nothing to prevent them carrying out similar work in a self-employed capacity. So my...