There has been some interesting comment in The Times about the suggestion, emanating from ACCA, that buy-to-let landlords are to be hit for tax bills.

The row is about how much mortgage interest they have been claiming against their rental income.

The Thunderer fumed about the suggestion in its leader on Tuesday saying: 'It is unreasonable to work on the assumption that buy-to-let investors have sought deliberately to defraud the tax authorities in the past and that they should be punished by heavy extra interest charges and demands for penalty payments.'

Quite, and luckily enough, the taxman never works on that basis. It makes enquiries into people's tax affairs. If it thinks they have evaded tax deliberately, they'll be for the high jump. If it's not deliberate, they'll get a lighter fine.

The Times also described buy-to-let as a 'market' and a 'sector' and as a 'socially useful investment,' which I think we can all agree is pretty much nonsense. These are people with second homes, not some kind of fledgling industry trying to get off the ground. Buy-to-let, alongside other factors, has driven property prices through the roof, creating huge inequalities in the housing market. Landlords are hardly victims.

The best comment for me was this one, from a Times reader called 'Beate', on the website; 'I very much doubt that people who take out a second mortgage to buy a property can be so stupid as to accidentally over-declare their mortgage repayments...Sympathy? I have none!'

May 31, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Who would have thought that you could glamorise the taxman?

Two identical twins have, in a book about a Customs investigator called DJ Smith investigating a heroin smuggling ring. Read the full story here

May 29, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

I bring news of the 34th most important man in Gloucestershire, Mike Warburton.

I attended a rival magazine's awards do last night (oh, go on, it was the Lexis Nexis Taxation awards, and we love each other really), where many of the great and the good from the world of tax were celebrating.

Amongst the many awards handed out were one for Paul Aplin, the very worthy winner of the 'Tax Personality of the Year Award' for his work on getting the government to do a u-turn on bringing back filing deadlines.

McGrigors got a gong for being the best tax team in a law firm, and Graham Aaronson won best tax lawyer.

Even a journalist won an award, with Vanessa Houlder of the FT winning tax writer of the year. As a lowly tax hack, I found that encouraging, given the award is almost always given to advisers and specialists.

There were many other awards for firms, and most had reason to celebrate.

But back to Mike, who won the 'Lifetime Achievement' award. I should disclose an interest, in that I was Mike's guest last night, but even so, the award was the most unexpected and pleasing of the evening.

There are those who might argue that Mike likes the limelight and has a bit too much time for the media. Foolish names and foolish faces are often seen in public places, as the saying goes.

I'm not one of those. Instead I'd argue Mike uses his media profile to do huge amounts of work for taxpayers who write in to the national newspapers, answering queries in detail in often not hugely well-read parts of the paper. On top of that, he has an infectious enthusiasm and a love of new ideas. The tax world would be infinitely duller without him.

And just for the record, he said last night that, though he may have won the 'lifetime achievement' award, he doesn't plan on stopping any time soon.

May 25, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (1)

I know tax advisers like to avoid all sex scandal stories, so few of you will have noticed the Lord Browne episodes of the last week or so.

You'd be wrong to, of course, because there is an intriguing tax reason for looking more closely at them!

I was looking at the original Mail on Sunday pieces, which say that the inital legal proceedings were provoked by a suggestion from Lord Browne's former partner Jeff Chevalier that BP was thinking of moving abroad for tax reasons.

That is a pretty sensational claim, and rather leaves the threat of HSBC leaving in the shade. At the very least HSBC sounds like it ought to be based abroad given what its initials stand for. A company called British Petroleum leaving the country for tax reasons really would cause some rows.

The trick for BP would not, however, to be to decide to move abroad for tax reasons. It must be likely that it would be cheaper to do it elsewhere.

No, the trick is to how to do it to avoid reputational damage, by disguising it as some other move. Shell set up in The Hague through its 'restructuring', and Barclays looks set to pull off a similar move to Amsterdam if it can buy ABN (by no means a foregone conclusion). Holland is the destination of choice for holding companies for tax reasons, and anyone who can decide to settle there for 'business reasons' is sitting pretty.

Could BP pull off a similar move? It's unclear precisely how, but as with the Shell and Barclays cases, you're hardly aware such moves are happening until the deal is done. We can only wait and see.

More generally one might reflect that many have been speculating that the trickle of companies leaving the UK for tax reasons could become a flood. If you add in the possibility of private equity taking over FTSE giants and setting up offshore parents to structure the deal, you could say the flood is already happening before our eyes.

May 9, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)