H M Revenue & Customs will issue 850,000 penalty notices for late income tax returns this year. It sounds an astonishing number but actually about 8.8 million tax returns are filed a year (based on data here, page 9). That makes the error rate less than 10%, and given that many who receive penalties will
Read the Rest…

Some have suggested I should not have commented on Ken Livingstone’s tax affairs over the last couple of weeks. I reflected carefully before doing so, and did so only on the basis that all who took my comments made clear I was actually in favour of systemic reform of small company taxation. In fairness, both the Observer and Telegraph did that. But the issue carries
Read the Rest…

The current debate on paying civil servnats through limited companies is about fairness, about applying tax law, about the corruption of the civil service culture and about the undermining of belief in the principle of government itself. It is also about justice and equality. And at a practical level it should be about collecting tax
Read the Rest…

Small company taxation in the UK is unfair. It provides unreasonable advantages on occasion. It is open to abuse as recent experience shows. It is too commonly used to shift income to people who have not earned the earnings attributed to them. I tried to deal with all these issues in a paper I wrote in
Read the Rest…

This weeks ‘scandal’ at the Student Loan Company, where a director who appears to be an employee has been paid through a personal service company has excited lots of attention. I know there will be more similar stories: I have been called about them. But I’m not interested in the stories of the people involved;
Read the Rest…

I missed this letter in the Guardian on Tuesday from Philip King, CEO of the Institute of Credit Management, but it’s well worth noting: The business secretary announced on 4 March that small firms will no longer have to produce independently audited accounts in a measure he believes will save 42,000 businesses £40m per year.
Read the Rest…

The Office for Tax Simplification has published its first report on simplifying small business tax. I submitted evidence to this review and met the OTS. And they seem to have listened. One recommendation is for a reform I first suggested in 2006 – and which was (I know) reviewed extensively by HMRC at the time
Read the Rest…

The Chartered Institute of Tax issued the following press release today: The Chartered Institute of Taxation (CIOT) welcomes the second Early Day Motion (EDM) on income shifting that has been tabled in the House of Commons. When the first EDM was tabled the CIOT said that it had long been of the view that fundamental
Read the Rest…

I have triggered a lot of debate it seems on SME tax reform. I just posted the follwoing comment on AccountingWEB and thought I would repeat it here. It does in part answer questions posed here: Can I summarise what I have actually recommended since I think this might help?: a) That Limited companies have
Read the Rest…