Sauce for the Google goose

[Phanerothyme]

If the government do not like it, they should change the tax system to remove the loopholes. The tax system is much too complicated. That is the fault of successive governments. The taxpayers are just workintg within the system they have been given.

 

They do change the taxation system the whole time, but then the tax accountants simply tweak their last tax avoidance scheme to make it legal again. The tax accountant giving evidence to the select committee admitted that out of something like 28 tax avoidance schemes he had devised, 24 were now illegal.

 

The argument here is between spirit and letter of the law. Most of us, through PAYE, default to the spirit. If you can afford an expert and you earn enough to make it worthwhile, you can pay according to the letter of the law, even if that means paying no tax at all.

 

Live here, work here, pay no tax. Legally. Why would you do otherwise?

 

The only other alternative is to have international tax authorities with local powers, which let's face it, is totally pie in the sky; the people who make these decisions benefit from shuttling their money between tax regimes so aren't about to "vote for christmas".

[L00b]

The only other alternative is to have international tax authorities with local powers, which let's face it, is totally pie in the sky.

There is another alternative, and which would not involve surrendering sovereign taxation powers to an international body (...equally pie-in-the-sky, mind ) : a statutory tabula rasa, and start afresh.

 

Preferably after the ongoing lobbying issue has been solved, and provided it is solved satifactorily, so as to mitigate what caused, and perpetuates, the problem in the first place.

 

It would involve peeing off a hell of a lot of very influential (expectedly mostly foreign-) people, though.

 

And probably precipitate the economy into a third (expectedly short-) recession.

 

Bitter medicines and all that...

[Obelix]

Troulbe is unless you got the entire world to do it at the smae time we would just become a paraih state that is known for defaulting.... not a good idea for a trading nation...