The Association of Revenue and Customs \u00a0is the part of the First Division Association \u00a0the senior staff and managers at\u00a0H M Revenue & Customs. \u00a0In other words, this is the union of for HMRC's bosses.<\/p>\n
They have issued a damning report today \u00a0on the proposed general anti-avoidance principle \u00a0put forward by Graham \u00a0Aaranson QC \u00a0last year which now forms the basis of the consultation that the government is proposing on this issue. \u00a0As they say in a remarkably clear and succinct report<\/a>:<\/p>\n In December 2010 the Government asked Graham Aaronson QC to lead a review to consider introducing a general anti-avoidance rule (GAAR) into the UK tax system. His Report recommended a \u2018narrow\u2019 principle, centred on tackling \u2018egregious, or very aggressive, tax avoidance schemes.\u2019 This GAAR would have safeguards built in to protect taxpayers, and be assisted in its operation by an Advisory Panel. The Government has accepted these proposals and will set out detailed proposals for consultation in summer 2012 with a view to legislating in Finance Bill 2013.<\/p>\n ARC believes the proposal, and the concept of \u201cresponsible\u201d tax planning, may widen percep- tions of what is responsible tax planning and so make it harder to tackle avoidance. We suggest the Advisory Panel will cause taxpayers additional uncertainty and delay, as well as conflict with the current judicial process for appeal. Like HMG, ARC wants to tackle avoidance (very con- servatively estimated at \u00a35bn each year). We recommend instead a wider GAAR, fully resourced and able to provide taxpayers with clearances so as to provide more and early certainty on how HMRC views transactions. A narrow GAAR may otherwise serve to legitimise what is currently held to be avoidance. In other words, under the guise of tackling avoidance, it may actually facilitate it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I agree.<\/p>\n This is a GAAR that won't do what it says on the tin.<\/p>\n We need a real one. And I'm glad the \u00a0top professionals at HMRC are standing up and saying that. \u00a0 I'm also pleased that this gives a very clear message that the problems which I highlight, time and again, at HMRC are not because of the quality of the people they employ, but because of the political capture of the very top of this organisation where, in particular, the \u00a0Board has almost nobody \u00a0on it who understand anything about tax. \u00a0This is the problem that has to be tackled.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Association of Revenue and Customs \u00a0is the part of the First Division Association \u00a0the senior staff and managers at\u00a0H M Revenue & Customs. \u00a0In
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":[134,107,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gantip","category-hmrc","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14983","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=14983"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14983\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}