UK now has longest tax code in the world
In the House of Commons last night shadow paymaster general Mark Francois revealed that the UK now has the longest national tax code in the world. Rob Lewis reports.
The chancellor's 2007 Finance Bill, which has now achieved its second reading in Westminster, takes the code up to just short of 10,000 pages.
"This represents a significant burden with which business are struggling to comply," Francois said. The last time any research was done on this subject was by the World Bank and PricewaterhouseCoopers in November, when the UK was second place to India for tax complexity.
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Refactor
There is an exercise in software development known as refactoring, which means (approximately) simplifying by removing repeated and redundant code, and grouping items together that can make use of commonality. Simplified software has fewer bugs.
If Gordon wanted to do us all a favour, he would refactor the tax codes - I imagine that would lead to fewer "loopholes" too (apart from the ones he himself introduces a year or so before shutting them again).
Charging more?
Sounds eminently sensible given that taxation specialists must be the most highly qualified accountants of all given that we not only need to pilot our way through the morass of tax legislation, but thanks to the revenue's wheeze of ensuring that profits by all entities, even the self employed, have to be reported for tax purposes using UK GAAP, we have to be fully conversant with all of the nuances and rule changes that this brings - for a practical demonstration look at UITF40. We are the greatest - and we should be the most expensive too...
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Can we charge more?
Does this mean that we can charge our clients more due to the extra complexity!!!!
The government talks about cutting red tape, but this shows the reality.