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Brings out the age old issue of where avoidance ends and evasion begins.
I guess it will ever be a 'grey area' - but the issue is that it is sureley incumbent on any authority to indicate that it has 'taken a view', and for the supplicant to adjust, or not, their avtivity accordingly.
Retrospection should be limited to when the authority made the indication.
Sadly, in the UK, the legal device to enable 'long retrospection' is the artifact of 'legal discovery' - which essentially is where the judge says "This has always been wrong/illegal, but we have now serendipitously discovered this and therefore require restitution since it first occurred, whatever it is".
This is grossly unfair - if even the judges/legal profession didn't realise it was a wrong, what hope is there for us norms?
Using DOTAS registration as a basis for APN's was a disgraceful abuse of retrospective actions. The whole point of DOTAS was that HMRC was told in fine detail how any particular scheme worked, thus having the opportunity to challenge the users if they thought it didn't work or change the law if they thought is was within the letter of the law but stretching it. Within the tax avoidance arena DOTAS schemes at least had the advantage of laying all the cards out for HMRC to examine. Instead of changing the law if necessary they just treated the transparency as pointers to low-hanging fruit to bang out APN's. Nobody believed DOTAS registration meant that HMRC approved the scheme, but it did mean that the scheme didn't rely on concealment (which is a sure pointer to evasion) to slip through.
Interesting article and surprise that we appear to be ahead of Germany. Give HMRC credit where it is due (gosh, that's twice in one week - I need a break).
Interesting comment about devolution. UK-wide taxes need to be administered by a UK-wide tax authority.
Don't worry there are plenty of other tax avoidance schemes in the UK, I dont think we will be adopting this one.