IT contractors have been warned that the concept of IR35 will not be going anywhere.

While the current legislation may well be abolished, whatever comes in its place is going to have the same central aim, according to Contractor Calculator.

Ministers have given IT contractors repeated assurances that the IR35 tax code will be replaced with something simpler, and the chancellor George Osborne duly set up the Office for Tax Simplification to assess what he called Britain's "spaghetti bowl" of tax rules.

However, Contractor Calculator's chief executive officer Dave Chaplin said that the IR35 replacement will still look to identify disguised workers who are not paying a fair amount of tax, it will hopefully just be better at it.

"Those who are currently caught by IR35 are very likely to still be caught by whatever replaces it," he said.

Kate Cottrell of tax specialists Bauer & Cottrell recently insisted that the new legislation needs to be able to make subtle distinctions between different types of worker.