How to avoid the CSA

Many people come to this website looking for advice on how to avoid the CSA and avoid paying the CSA. The truth is that if you’re employed you have very little option as eventually the CSA will go to your employer and hit them with a deduction of earnings order (DEO) which will take money from your salary before your receive it.

There’s nothing your employer can do about it because the CSA will threaten them with bailiffs if they don’t comply.

However, there is a way you can avoid the DEO from the CSA, and that’s to be contracted. If your employer will allow you to go self employed, so you submit your own self assessment tax return, the CSA cannot issue a DEO. You deal with your own tax, therefore they have to go through you.

This way you can claim for travel expenses to and from work in your self assessment, and other costs as well, such as equipment. Your ‘take home’ pay would be much lower and the CSA would only be able to claim less from you.

If anyone has any other ideas on avoiding paying the CSA please let us know below, we’d be glad to hear from them and would like to share them with everyone else who is having trouble with the CSA.