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This is just a brief note to say goodbye: I'm leaving Accountancy Age, and will not be writing this blog any longer. Today is my last day.
I hope it's been entertaining and informative, perhaps not both at the same time. It's been a lot of fun writing, with some posts being picked up elsewhere and hopefully having an impact.
Thanks for taking the time to read the blog, and special thanks to those who put their necks on the line and added comments on sometimes controversial issues.
I don't know about you, but I'm thinking it's about the right time of year for some wild speculation about when the PBR will be.
So, in the hope of either getting this drastically wrong and looking silly, or telling you something you already know, I offer you these nuggets of probably useless information.
Stephen Timms, the new minister in charge of HM Revenue & Customs, told a conference on Monday that the PBR will just 'a few weeks away,' my colleague Judith Tydd tells me.
The Times says today that a November PBR is likely (which would be the first November PBR since 2002, a meaningless fact for those of you that like trivia).
And there was a rumour that one of the big firms had instructed key staff not to take a holiday in the week beginning November 10th.
Drawing all these facts together, I'm going for November 12th.
I'd tell you not to arrange any important meetings for that day, but let's not get carried away, eh?
So - Dave Hartnett has become the new 'permanent secretary for tax' - a new role designed especially for him.
As far as the department goes this probably ticks all the boxes. Hartnett gets to focus on tax policy - undoubtedly playing to his strengths - but also gets to be a permanent secretary, meaning more clout and more dealing with ministers. It is a recognition of his importance to the department, frankly.
But there is one odd and small point. One of the great criticisms of the Varney structure at HMRC - the McKinsey matrix - was that accountabilities had become confused. Nobody knew who was in charge.
No doubt Dave Hartnett would dismiss the criticism with his usual confident swagger, but it might be worth asking how having three bosses - Hartnett, Lesley Strathie and Mike Clasper - improves that situation.
Just what is the influence, positive or negative, of the Taxpayers' Alliance?
Ross Clark has a crack at registering the campaign body's impact on public discussion over at the Spectator.
It's something I think about occasionally. I wouldn't say we use a lot of their press releases, but occasionally - in part because the fuss they are kicking up becomes an important political tax event in itself - it's unavoidable. Should we use them more, or less, I wonder?
The body is undoubtedly interesting. And as Ross says, it's very one-sided:
It is so one-sided that one almost yearns for some opposition on the subject.
But I don't think, as he says, that the reason it is doing well is because the political parties are not talking about tax. Or that tax has reached 'saturation point' - even if we were pretty lightly taxed relative to where we are now, there is always a market for 'waste of taxpayers' money' stories. Dislike of elements of the public sector runs pretty deep.
I'd argue, as he mentions in passing, that the Alliance is just filling a gap where investigative journalism used to be. Without indulging in dewy-eyed nostalgia, surely it is the duty of local papers to be highlighting a lot of this stuff? Being understaffed compared to where they were, they can't (the same might be said of national newspapers' coverage of tax, frankly).
Of course, were the papers highlighting the 'waste' of government funds, arguably there might be more balance to it. Newspapers have forums for people to bite back and claim, to use an example the Alliance has got hot and bothered about, that Paul Gray was doing a good job at HM Revenue & Customs despite the data scandal.
Personally, I think the Alliance provides a worrying sign of the likely future of public debate, where PRs and well-funded interest groups, rather than traditional media (for all their faults), dominate debate. It won't make for sensible public discussion.
A philosophical question about tax for you this morning...
Gordon Brown wants to force energy companies to encourage energy efficiency but the companies will not be allowed to pass the cost on to consumers.
So they have to fork out £300m each year for the next three years for the advice.
If they pass on the cost to consumers, they'll be charged a windfall tax, The Times is saying this morning.
My question for you is this: who will the windfall tax be passed on to?
The ongoing row over the windfall tax on energy companies seems to miss a fairly fundamental point to me.
There are plenty of good opinion pieces out there criticising the idea. Ross Clark in The Times is worth reading, and if you want a contrary opinion, try, as ever, Richard Murphy, who thinks the tax is necessary and would be a good idea. Chris Dillow offers some intriguing and more positive suggestions for tackling the issue.
Personally, I think the idea is a non-starter because it is politically suicidal.
When New Labour introduced its last windfall tax, it did so for fairly well enumerated reasons, and did so in spite of the fact that it made the party look anti-business, when it was trying to prove the opposite.
At this moment in the electoral cycle, those considerations will come into play in an even more marked fashion.
Britain is about to enter recession, with colossal public debts worked up by a Labour chancellor and now prime minister. Unemployment is threatening to soar, business is suffering, and the tax burden is threatening to rise as the government casts around for solutions to solve its mounting problems.
What worse possible policy could you imagine in that context, than a huge tax grab explicitly designed for redistributive purposes, that will be easily categorised as an anti-business move?
If Brown is forced into it, the comparisons with the demise of previous over-spending and under-performing Labour administrations will be overwhelming. Brown should pursue austerity, and resist this tax move.
The government's plan to offer a stamp duty holiday has unravelled at extraordinary speed.
I was in two minds as to whether or not to discuss it on Tuesday or Wednesday, because it's one of those policies that seems too silly to even bother to knock down. Thankfully, both Chris Dillow and Ross Clark did a good job on that front, saving the rest of us some time.
What I wanted to discuss here is the government's attempts to row back from the plan. The line today is that it's pure 'speculation' and kite-flying by the national media.
Pull the other one. The original Sun piece was by George Pascoe-Watson, the paper's political editor. The piece was a full rundown of Gordon Brown's plans to tackle the impact of the credit crunch and, to this observer at least, looked like having come from a briefing from Number 10. It seems an implausible thing for The Sun to have made up, frankly.
The move is already seeing the market seize up as buyers wait to take advantage of the proposed tax break. If the Treasury had any sense, it would come out and explicitly rule out the plan. What chance of that, I wonder?
I haven't really known what to make of the Tories' plans on tax simplification.
Tax complexity is one of those tricky topics that I think nobody really knows how to solve, and I suspect there are good reasons for Richard Murphy-like cynicism about the whole project.
The plans are two-fold: firstly, an Office of Tax Simplification to monitor tax policies.
And secondly, a joint parliamentary committee on tax matters.
Of the two, I like the second far more than the first. Members of the House of Commons are, to put it mildly, very ill-briefed on tax frequently. To ask them to scrutinise the finance bill is hopeless, and a joint committee, comprising the much more experienced members of the House of Lords as well as those from the commons, would add to the intelligence of the debate.
The Office of Tax Simplification is less attractive. More bureaucrats do not create less bureaucracy; surely a principle the Tory party exists to promote.
Like a Corporate Social Responsibility department within a multi-national company, it will only exist to be paid lip-service to. Real simplicity, like real CSR, comes from the top; in the case of tax, from clear thinking and a desire and political will to embrace radical solutions.
Take one example. The debate over multi-nationals leaving the country has been hampered by complex arguments over whether we should lower the corporate tax rate, or just hammer the big companies with fiercely complicated rules about overseas subsidiaries. I doubt either would work.
In fact, the most elegant solution, rarely discussed, came from Deloitte. It suggested a low tax rate for mobile income, recognising that some things can be taxed and some can't.
The Tories should aim for similar realism on all aspects of tax; through doing so, they may get somewhere towards a simpler and better tax system.
Just a short post to say - if you're interested in the saga of former HMRC chairman Paul Gray's payoff, Sue Cameron in the FT has some good gossip.
As someone who has been writing about the Vodafone CFC case over the last two years like an overexcited puppy, I can hardly turn around now and say that the case isn't significant at all. But in one sense, it arguably is.
Esteemed experts from accountancy firms and from law firms are all lining up to say that the High Court's rejection of the CFC rules is terrible news for the government, and removes a key set of anti-avoidance principles.
But will it have any impact?
Few companies have big CFC liabilities like Vodafone, because the rules are an obstacle rather than anything else: companies plan around them. So there aren't thought to be huge numbers of cases awaiting resolution.
And secondly, noone is going to say to themselves now: 'Why don't we ignore the government's controlled foreign companies rules.'
Whatever happens, the government will introduce new rules that will have a similar effect, so I doubt anyone's behaviour will ultimately change going forward. (it will actually prove more of a problem for taxpayers, since they'll have to master the new rules rather than the old ones.)
What's more, I suspect there is some doubt the judgment will stand. Taxpayers often win in the High Court, with HMRC having a better record elsewhere. With £2bn at stake, there's no danger of anyone backing down if they don't have to.
The really intriguing part of the case is not, if you ask me, what impact this has for other companies, but on what Vodafone was up to.
The company has declined to elaborate on the details of its Luxembourg subsidiary, which bought the shares of Mannesmann, and in which those shares attract no capital gains charge.
Are all relevant management decisions made in Luxembourg? Are there lots of people there? Vodafone says it meets the tests, but hasn't pleaded its case in court in full.
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