It's being widely trailed that the budget will include endorsement of Graham Aaranson's so called\u00a0general anti-avoidance rule tomorrow.<\/p>\n
So let's be clear, Aaranson did not propose a\u00a0general anti-avoidance rule in his study, published last November. As he said:<\/a><\/p>\n I have concluded that introducing a broad spectrum general anti-avoidance rule would not be beneficial for the UK tax system. This\u00a0would carry a real risk of undermining the ability of business and \u00a0individuals to carry out sensible and responsible tax planning.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In other words he proposed business as usual.<\/p>\n What he did suggest was:<\/p>\n However, introducing a moderate rule which does not apply to responsible tax planning, and is instead targeted at abusive arrangements, would be beneficial for the UK tax system.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n One person's moderate is another person's extreme. In this case his\u00a0moderate\u00a0rule is no such thing. As he says of his plan, it is:<\/p>\n clearly intended to\u00a0apply only to egregious, or very aggressive, tax avoidance schemes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n He named but one such scheme, and has admitted to me, for I was involved in the discussion leading to his recommendations, that he suspects they will be few and far between.<\/p>\n So yes: the\u00a0government\u00a0is introducing a scheme to stop the very worst\u00a0excesses\u00a0of the tax planning industry that most people in their right minds never went near. But the normal abuse that\u00a0ensures\u00a0the wealthiest in this country will carry on avoiding their liabilities will continue,\u00a0completely\u00a0unabated.<\/p>\n And that's\u00a0exactly\u00a0what the\u00a0government\u00a0intends should happen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s being widely trailed that the budget will include endorsement of Graham Aaranson’s so called\u00a0general anti-avoidance rule tomorrow. So let’s be clear, Aaranson did not
Read the full article…<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[127,134],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-budget","category-gantip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14658\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}