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« September 2006 | Main |November 2006 »
...you notice details in people's wills that are almost certainly tax related.
I read this over the weekend about John Peel. The trust set up for his children is worth £263,000, suggesting it must be a nil-rate band discretionary trust, a handy IHT saver.
Good to see, I suppose, that the great man had a good tax adviser.
Is anyone else bored of the sterile debate on the Tories' tax policy? Practically everyone in the UK seems to have contributed their opinions on the report, which details policies that aren't going to be implemented. Not because the Tories won't get in, but just because senior Tories seem to have explicitly disavowed most of it.
We've known for quite a while that the Tories tax policy is this: no costed and promised tax cuts, but a general promise to cut them, corporation tax in particular. That, and a sweeping away of tax reliefs.
Is anyone any the wiser after the acres of comment about the Forsyth commission yesterday?
Business is worried about the increasing aggression of HMRC, and the dominance of Customs in particular.
So if you were to set up a review of the department's links with business, why on earth would you appoint Sir David to do it?
Blackberry users could be charged tax on the personal e-mails they send, according to various reports circulating. The original idea, I'm told, came from Wilkins Kennedy.
HMRC have described the suggestions as 'complete nonsense,' and I couldn't agree more. The whole idea that there is any significant problem here is ludicrous. Nobody is going to be counting e-mails, personal and business, to judge whether devices are used for business purposes. It would be a waste of everyone's time.
But if you go around giving your employees mp3 players, you can't really claim (unless you work in the music industry) that those are for business purposes.
Likewise, if you give someone a computer for work, it should be fairly clear whether it's for work or not. Is that really complicated? (perhaps only for those who want to abuse the system)
The key point is whether the personal use is 'not significant,' according to the guidance. There could be some discussions about this, but not too many I'd have thought. There's not much money involved, after all.
Anne Redston, who had argued this was a problem, wrote in Taxation last month: 'Providng HMRC agree to maintain the practical approach for VAT which they applied to the Home Computer Initiative scheme, this new guidance means that most business and their employees will now be able to avoid the bureaucratic burden of identifying the private use of work computers.'
That, for me, seems to be the end of the matter.
HSBC has got itself into a bit of a stew over tax. Chris Spooner said last week to an institute conference that HSBC had moved HQ in the past and would consider it again, especially as the UK was increasingly a poor place to be.
Tax rates, and the tax base after anti-avoidance moves, have climbed (in my personal view, by too much, in that I continue to believe in low tax economies promoting growth). There will come a breaking point where it makes sense for companies to move abroad, and they will have a duty to their shareholders to do so.
But there are plenty of reasons to stay, as Richard Murphy makes clear here.
I've written before about companies saying they don't find the UK competitive and are going to move. I fear this is another case of it all being very well saying it: are you going to do it?
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