Socialist tax efficiency

[DodgyAgent]

scans implies a skill set and reading comprehension age well beyond the average agent....

I got a GCSE in cut and paste

[Batcher]

scans implies a skill set and reading comprehension age well beyond the average agent....

I should have been clearer. They use software to scan for keywords.

[DodgyAgent]

I should have been clearer. They use software to scan for keywords.

What is software?

[MicrosoftBob]

What is software?

For you, somrehere to hold your nads

[Zero Liability]

Tax avoiders are morally indefensible - but some tax avoiders are less morally indefensible than others.

Whilst I agree on a lot of points, I don't think this is true. Although there is certainly a need for a re-think of the tax system, and that includes examining it from the POV of what it is meant to achieve, morality simply does not factor into the present system. As others have said, if you were to examine it from that point of view, there is plenty about the system that is immoral, which politicians conveniently neglect. One of those is the fact that they lambast tax avoidance as an electioneering device, but then implement rules to exempt themselves from any repercussions when doing it themselves. These are individuals whose entire income in their capacity as government employees is purely tax-derived! It's just crocodile's tears.

So, I think although DA's original phrasing was a bit unfortunate, I think he makes a good, valid point, that we as contractors should get behind. Ultimately, the country is overtaxed and burdened with a horribly inefficient tax system, with the inevitable result that it is used in this way.

I think its over complex because

1) no one is brave enough to fix it
2) fixing it will take longer than 5 years so no government has the ability to do it...

3) they like it as it is, they just don't want the plebs getting in on it.

Probably a combination of all the above. I'd like to see whether all this talk of NI and PAYE unification by the Tories is going to go anywhere should they win the next election.

Another related question.

If these schemes are not following the "intention" of the law, but the letter, surely the same argument can be applied to IR35?
I understand it was to catch the "Friday-to-Monday" contractors, so, in a nutshell, if I have never been an employee of the client I have a contract with, how can I be caught by IR35?

Just another example of politicians, of all colours, bending the truth to fit their own agenda. Just pisses me off that we are the pawns in this one.

Yup, agree entirely.

[SpontaneousOrder]

Tax avoiders are morally indefensible...

I see it as a moral duty to avoid tax wherever possible. The funny thing is that when you look at it like that (and I believe in that wholeheartedly) the whole thing gets very simple.

It's only when you believe in ideas of morality ungoverned by any sense of consistency or objectivity - and selectively choose to ignore the law of non-contradiction - that things get this complicated.

Making sense of objectively valid morality is easy. Making sense of the other kind is pseudo-intellectual masturbation for thugs.

Note: All characters appearing in this post are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

[Zero Liability]

Especially since they see it as their "moral" duty to tax as much as possible (with no relation to the services they in turn monopolise and the consumption of which they compel), spend as much as possible (see the tax bit), borrow as much as possible (often at the expense of the unborn), so that they can be re-elected as much as possible (and go on to rebuke virtually all their electoral promises or deliver on hugely re-defined forms of them), so their political CVs can be filled with as many electoral victories as possible... etc.

[DodgyAgent]

Thank you Sam Leith in the Standard tonight! My points exactly:

Sam Leith: Tax avoiders are not the issue, it's the tax-law fixers - Comment - Comment - London Evening Standard

Even though he is a lefty he understands the concept of objectivity.

Hypocrite! Weasel! Fink! Such is the substance of the pre-election cross-party ding-dong over tax. One day Ed Miliband huffs that the Tory donor Lord Fink’s “vanilla” tax avoidance is “dodgy”; the next, senior Tories puff about “breathtaking hypocrisy” as it’s revealed that the Labour donor Sir David Garrard has enjoyed a scoop of vanilla himself. As Chandler once put it on the sitcom Friends: “Oh God! Can open: worms everywhere...”

It doesn’t help the prevalent cynicism that so many voices in the public conversation have skin in the game.

Many media commentators, including columnists and TV pundits, are registered as limited companies so as to pay corporation tax rather than income tax (I’m not, since you ask. My accountant suggested it about a week after I’d written a column mocking Ken Livingstone for doing just that, and brass-necked though I may be ...)



More importantly, their employers — everywhere from the Guardian Media Group, which published the HSBC leaks, to News Corp, which led on Sir David Garrard’s arrangements — have benefited from legal tax avoidance strategies.

All this encourages the notion that members of the political and media classes are just as spoilt, chiselling and hypocritical as each other. They may very well be. But it seems to me that it might be wise to draw focus a little.

The terms of public debate about taxation have slipped from evasion being the bad thing, to “aggressive avoidance” being the bad thing, to “avoidance” tout court being anathema. That sells the pass.

In effect we’ve made the primary conversation a moral question rather than a legal one. Quite right, too, you might think, flushed with pleasurable indignation. But in doing so we move the battleground from the (nearly) black-and-white into the foggy grey. As so often, conjugation does the trick: I am tax-efficient; you are avoiding tax; he is dodgy. And amid those foggy grey conjugations we blunder, going nowhere fast.

There are two points here. The first, minor one, is about election funding. As Ken Clarke rightly points out, it follows as night follows day that if political parties continue to be beholden to rich men and corporations for their funding, some of the dodgy will rub off.

They’ll always end up playing dodgy-donor tit-for-tat: both complicit, both hypocritical, both losing voter trust and respect.

The solution is a matter for another discussion: state funding has problems too, though a donation cap seems like a sensible start.

But the bigger point is about the tax gap itself. You get nowhere towards a systemic fix by leaving the law broken, and instead spending your energies raging ad hominem on a case-by-case basis against those whose tax affairs seem to you to push things too far. Name-and-shame is neither a practical nor, in the end, a morally robust way of policing tax avoidance.

Don’t leave it up to conscience. Don’t waffle vaguely about paying one’s “fair share” or debating the difference between vanilla and raspberry ripple. Vanish the gap, rather, between what’s legal and what’s moral.

Close the damn loopholes, and be seen to do so.

Wouldn’t a winning platform for any party be not to jeer at tax-avoiding donors to the other side but to say: we’re going to fix the tax law and then — provided you stay within it – avoid away as much as you like?

[darmstadt]

What is software?

this is

[Zero Liability]

Ed Balls among 12 shadow cabinet members who claimed expenses without receipts - Telegraph