I wrote a peer reviewed paper on flat taxes for the ACCA in 2006. If you think flat taxes are the answer, download it here, and think again. 

I’ve gor an article on Comment is Free under the above title this afternoon, analysing the Taxpayer’s Alliance proposal for a flat tax in the UK. Read it here.

I seem to have reignited some debate on flat taxes this morning, so let me mention this old theme of mine in a little more detail. Back in 2006 the ACCA published a report they commissioned from me entitled “A flat tax for the UK? The implications of simplification”. The report was paid for by ACCA research funds
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Cameron faced his backbenchers yesterday on the EU, and lost. But the EU was not the whole reason for this. Polly Toynbee had what was, without doubt, the best line on this issue: But the “in or out” debate was never just a dry calculation of national interest. The two sides stand for profoundly different visions
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I was at a meeting in Westminster this morning organised by the Association of Revenue & Customs – the union representing the senior staff of H M Revenue & Customs, which is affiliated to the Tax Justice Network. Accountancy Age has reported the comments made by Graham Black, its president who said: THE TREASURY IS
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There’s a great paper under the above title in the Romanian Journal of Economic Forecasting by Liviu Voinea and Flaviu Mihaescu. As they report: In this paper we focused on the flat tax impact on inequality in Romania. We compared 2005 against 2004, when we were able to isolate the flat tax impact from other
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The IMF has published a paper on the Laffer curve that concludes: The paper shows how tax rate cuts can increase revenues by improving tax compliance. The intuition is that tax evasion has externalities: tax evaders protect each other, because they tie down limited enforcement capacity. Thus, relatively small tax rate cuts, which decrease incentives
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I was quite pleased to find one of my old articles on flat tax reappear on the web of late. It originally appeared on Society Guardian and never made it onto the Guardian web site. But it was very well read in some very useful places, so I thought it worth giving it a new
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Financial Week has a headline that says: A tax reform plan not only accountants would love It refers to a proposal by the New York State Society of Certified Public Accountants (the US equivalent of Chartered Accountants) for what they call a simple exact transparent tax (SET). Now let’s be blunt, the SET is a
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