While Dave Hartnett steps up to the top job in the UK, his former counterpart in the US, Mark Everson, is down in the dumps.

Everson, who was previously commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, has left his latest role at the Red Cross after having an affair with a junior member of staff, the Wall Street Journal is saying.

Hartnett and Everson were supposedly the axis on which the US and UK's close cooperation on tax avoidance hinged.

I wonder whether Hartnett will be a little too busy to send a message of support to his old chum. Apart from anything else, he's facing MPs next week for the first time in his new role.

And as Francine McKenna points out, perhaps there will be some at KPMG not entirely unhappy at the latest turn of events.

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

I think the phrase 'disgruntled lemmings' could become a convenient shorthand for HMRC staff from now on.

I particularly like the idea of punchbags in the shape of HMRC executive committee members. I think there are some members of the tax profession who wouldn't mind some of those too.

November 28, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Is there anyone else hoping that the discs crisis at HM Revenue & Customs might yield one positive result? By that I mean the confusion over what to call the department.

Ever since the merger, and being used to calling the Revenue the Inland Revenue, some papers still insist on calling HMRC the HMRC. Or they call it HM Customs and Revenue, or, even, the Inland Revenue.

The department has been in place for three years now. Time for people to catch up, I think.

UPDATE: Richard Brooks of Private Eye has pointed out to me that even the Prime Minister is making the mistake. He referred in his press conference yesterday to 'the Inland Revenue'. When even the man responsible for merging the departments gets it wrong, what hope for everyone else?

Double points for anyone who can find Gus O'Donnell, the civil servant whose review recommended the merger, making a similar mistake.

November 26, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

The CBI has some research figures out today that suggest entrepreneurs are considering selling up before April, a phenomenon that we are expecting but don't really have a precise handle on.

Those involved in the ongoing row about CGT might benefit from looking at some HMRC research into the tax from a year ago.

The taxman published some Ipsos-MORI numbers about this time last year, which had some interesting avoidance stuff in, but more importantly has some data that precedes the current row on how CGT affects investment decisions.

Quite a lot of people said they thought about the tax a lot when investing, and if you click through to the paper and go to page 57 you'll see a whole bundle of figures on it.

But what caught my eye more was the introduction;

While CGT was generally not cited spontaneously as a consideration in CGT payers’ investment behaviour, when prompted specifically about this, far more viewed it as a consideration.

It wouldn't be the case, would it, that people claim tax is hugely important to them when asked about it. But, unprompted, they actually reveal what they really think, that it doesn't matter to them really?

November 26, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

The Mercury story has thrust 'gilt strips' back into the headlines. This was a scheme from a few years back and caused the government some anguish.

Readers who want more detail could do worse than reading Dave Hartnett's view of gilt strips, given to parliament a few years back.

He said:

This was marketed to and used by wealthy individuals in conditions of some secrecy. The aim was to create and sell options over gilt strips to generate income losses matched by gains that were outside the capital gains tax regime, and the losses were then used to match against other income and reduce tax liability. For some people—and we have not seen the relevant tax returns yet—we understand the aim was to reduce it to nil, so they would pay no tax. It was sold widely by major accounting firms for about six months in the summer of 2003, maybe a little earlier as well, and stopped by the Government by an announcement on 15 January.

He said then it had cost the government £200m. I'll post a fuller description later, hopefully...

November 23, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Is anyone else quite intrigued by the story about peers' expenses?

The story, in brief, is that our friends in the Upper House have been claiming £300 in 'expenses' a day pretty much routinely, without declaring receipts.

The Times uncovered the issue and spoke to several peers about it, some of whom were quite admirably candid.

If the rest of us did that, though, we'd get into trouble. As David Vine from GlobalExpense put it: 

Chief executives and partners in City firms, just as much as ordinary employees, need to submit expense claims with receipts in order for these to be reimbursed. Claims that aren’t supported by receipts generally fall outside the scope of any tax dispensation [ie you can’t claim them as untaxed expenses] and, if they are not correctly reported and subsequently discovered by HMRC visits, may also result in a stiff fine.

HMRC's response was as follows: 'Payment of expenses is a matter for House authorities. HMRC do not comment on individual cases.'

Except this isn't an individual case, is it? It's a case of a group of individuals not submitting receipts when claiming their expenses. HMRC is only too happy to talk about groups - plumbers, contractors and so on and so on - when it feels there is a risk attached to that group.

Perhaps it is time m'Lords received an intervention letter?

November 14, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Here's a story that passed under the radar and for various reasons, we never got around to doing.

Dave Hartnett gave an interview in October to Tax Adviser magazine, the journal of the Chartered Institute of Taxation and the Association of Taxation Technicians.

In it, he got on to the subject of Arctic Systems, on which HM Revenue & Customs is noticeably vulnerable (it's not something they choose to talk about, I've noticed). Not only did they pick on a small firm with an old set of rules not designed for the purpose, they pursued it all the way to the House of Lords over just £7,000 and claimed, at the same time, that it wasn't a test case. Of course not.

So what did Hartnett have to say about this most sensitive of subjects?

'It was and still is a really important issue, and we tackled that case in a thoroughly professional way. I think it is really interesting the way that private sector tax professionals were split on Arctic Systems. Many agreed with us and many didn't.'

He then went on to say that ministers wanted to tackle the issue, which of course we now know.

There's two issues with his remarks. Firstly, many would question quite how 'professional' the tackling of this issue was. Some would say it was a dog's dinner.

But most provocative, I thought, was the suggestion that many tax professionals agreed with HMRC's attitude to Arctic Systems. I presumed that most tax professionals thought the arrangements of Geoff and Diana Jones were standard tax planning, and that it wasn't worth HMRC's while to tackle it, however well you could spin a line that there was an element of contrivance in it.

Am I wrong, or is Dave Hartnett?

November 5, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)