Tax Liability for a Community Group?

A question about : Tax Liability for a Community Group?

Hello
I am a member of a community group. We are funded through membership subscriptions and donations. We also sell tickets for an annual concert, which usually results in a surplus after expenses. We are not a charity.
Our overall income surplus is around Ј500 a year, which is used to fund future expenditure of the group.
Question is - what, if anything, is our tax liability? Do we qualify for any allowances? What rate of tax would we pay? How do we arrange to pay this with HMRC? Would we be better to turn ourselves into a charity?
Many thanks!

Best answers:

• Rightly or wrongly, whenever I've been involved in such groups tax liability has never entered my head ....
• There is a distinction between private members' clubs and clubs which trade with the public. So for example most cricket and golf clubs are set up as members' clubs which trade with themselves, hence no reportable profit for tax.
  Note that when you enter such places for a dinner dance or similar function - or to play a match - you sign in as a guest, which means you are a temporary member. Hence once again the club is not trading with the public. Note that HMRC has been taking more of an interest in such clubs in recent years, totally wrongly in my view their time is better spent digging into the Swiss subsidiaries of HSBC and so on. So such clubs which have not been keeping their signing in procedures properly have found tax demands on their doormats.
  Such clubs are often registered as CASCs - Community Amateur Sports Clubs - where there is any question of tax to pay, for example arising from the employment of a professional cricketer. Any tax on profits is under corporation tax at 20%. Another example is a local angling club I do the books and corporation tax returns for. The club owns rights to a prime stretch of a Lake District river and makes profits from these rights.
  In your case, if you want everything to be totally above board you should probably consider a Community Interest Company or Social Enterprise, the latter of which need not be a company. My guess on the basis of the post is that you may have some tax to pay based on the trade with the public.
  https://www.gov.uk/government/organi...rest-companies
  https://www.socialenterprise.org.uk/
• Worth pointing out that my response may be irrelevant as the groups I've been involved in never ran events for which we sold tickets. chrismac has given what may be more relevent info!