IP Tax Solutions is a specialist tax practice. We advise founders and owner-managed businesses on the tax that attaches to their equity: raising SEIS and EIS money, share schemes and valuations, R&D relief, restructuring, family succession and exit.

A company meets each of these moments once. We meet them every week.

The founder

Steve Livingston founded the practice in 2013. Law degree, then qualified Chartered Accountant within corporate tax at KPMG, where he trained and rose to senior manager. Then a tax partnership at Crowe. In 2012 he left to focus exclusively on the work he does best: the tax of founders' equity and owner-managed businesses.

The grounding matters because this corner of tax is unforgiving of generalists. The reliefs are generous, the conditions are precise, and the cost of a missed condition usually surfaces years later, in due diligence or an HMRC enquiry, when it is hardest to fix.

"I'm direct. If your position is defensible, I'll tell you, and I'll fight for it. If it isn't, I'll tell you that too, before you spend money defending it."

What the record shows

Specifics say more than adjectives, so here are some.

• R&D claims worth hundreds of thousands of pounds defended against HMRC challenge, including two cases where fraud was alleged. Both were accepted without a single amendment.
• Cases taken to the brink of tribunal and resolved in the client's favour.
• SEIS and EIS structures agreed with HMRC that other advisers had declined to attempt, including multi-round raises with complications around connected persons and corporate investors.
• EMI valuations agreed with HMRC's Shares and Assets Valuation team at discounts that make schemes genuinely worth having.

And a steady line of quieter work that never makes a case study: cap tables untangled, registers rebuilt, family transfers sequenced properly, plans corrected before the error became expensive.

Professional standards

IP Tax Solutions Ltd is regulated by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. Steve Livingston LLB FCA is a Fellow of the ICAEW.

We are regulated by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales (ICAEW).