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As usual
RM does not know what he is talking about. Lord Hoffmann has stated extra‐judicially: “tax avoidance in the sense of transactions successfully structured to avoid a tax which Parliament intended to impose should be a contradiction in terms. The only way in which Parliament can express an intention to impose a tax is by a statute which means that such a tax is to be imposed. If that is what Parliament means, the courts should be trusted to give effect to its intention. Any other approach will lead us into dangerous and unpredictable territory.”
What HMRC and laypeople really mean by “(unacceptable) tax avoidance” is to view “Parliamentary intention” in its wider sense of what Parliament would have intended had it been able to foresee a particular outcome, yet the court felt bound by the narrower concept of parliamentary intention ‐ that which could be found within the words of the statute itself. E.g. Mayes.
HMRC’s comments here re tax avoidance make sense if understood in those proper terms.
Avoidance
This illustrates the point that the word "avoidance" in tax speak is now understood by everyone (apart from some accountants) to mean "evasion".
This is of course incorrect. Many will be avoiding some tax next year by taking a dividend on the 31st March instead of the 30th April. Nothing wrong, illegal or against the wishes of parliment in that.
Perhaps we should start to use a different word to mean a legitimate way of saving tax as the public seem to have been hoodwinked by HMRC and the media.