Crazy Cambridge HR stuff

I ran into two wacky Cambridge money related things which I felt like sharing.

First I got this email from the Cambridge HR department:

There were some changes in 2008 to the UK tax regime for individuals whose permanent home is overseas. You may well have heard news reports or seen media coverage concerning a new £30,000 annual levy for individuals who are non UK domiciled (domicile is best described as the country where an individual is regarded as having their permanent home which may not necessarily be the country where they are living from year to year).

You have been identified as a University employee who may be non UK domiciled i.e. who may have their permanent home overseas and who may only intend to work in the UK for a limited period of time.
...

Needless to say this freaked me out. It ends up that it only affects people from outside the country who are planning to live in the UK longer than 7 (or 9) years and who have foreign income as wall as UK income. It also seems like they are going after the rich types mostly. Since that is not me, I don't have to pay it and thus will not be living on the streets soon.

Second, I found out that the Cambridge/UK redundancy policy is downright cruel. For non-UK people, redundancy is like severance pay. It is 1 week for every complete year of employment. Quite literally. If you worked 2 years and 364 days then you get 2 weeks. They do not round up. In a hard economic time like this it is a heartless policy that could only come from greedy bureaucratic number crunchers. The bottomline is to make sure your contract lasts from start date to end date.

That's enough money fun for now.