Tax Avoidance

The Public Accounts select Committee has drawn attention to the peculiar custom of HMRC hiring accountants to help draft regulations, who then go back into their firms to advice clients how to get round them. There is a clear conflict in the style of poachers and gamekeepers.

It serves to underline the idiotic pass to which taxation has come with it myriad regulations, levels, applications, rates and allowances. This is a good moment to highlight the exception. PAYE-pay as you go- a system of tax collection from the employed, which is the envy of all the world and in which none of this tom foolery applies. What is needed is the same simplicity for the self employed and for business. The issue at the heart of the chaos is the notion  of profit, what it constitutes and where, when and in what tax jurisdiction it emerges.

The way to solve this is to detach profit from tax and instead tax (at a much lower percentage) turnover. Allowances for investment would be deductible and small businesses with a turnover of say £ 200,000 or less could be exempt, but the principle would be similar to VAT – if money flows it is taxed. The burden on business would be no greater, indeed it would be less, because the load would be fairly spread and none, no matter how big, clever, resourceful or multi-headed could escape. The days when the largest corporations, with the biggest turnover, making the most profit, could organise this profit to exit UK and emerge in the tax free land where the Bong tree grows, would be over. So would the days of a mostly unethical tax avoidance industry.

3 Responses to “Tax Avoidance”

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