A judgement upon them

[king_pellinor]

Quote from a recent case:

"It is something of a disgrace that in order to work out the tax consequences of an entirely ordinary commercial transaction one must refer to about 20 closely articulated and specific statutory provisions replete with cross references: and it is a matter of no great credit that the eventual method of charging tax is to postulate a notional sum paid under a hypothetical obligation, which notional payment is then itself treated "as if" it was something else so that it can be deemed to affect the repurchase price and create a fictional income flow. Having entered into such a maze of hypothesis, notion, fiction and deeming it would be no surprise to discover that the draftsman did not find himself quite where he intended or facing the direction he thought. "

See, this is why the Treasury should take advice from professionals before framing legislation :-D

Comments

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

See, this is why the Treasury should take advice from professionals before framing legislation

Ah, but which professionals? ;-)

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

If only there were some sort of highly-regarded institute of highly-regarded tax advisors for them to consult... ;-)

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Yes, but which "highly-regarded institute of highly-regarded tax advisors"?

[helflaed.livejournal.com]

Either because they want to have a job creation scheme for tax professionsls, or because they want to have rules which are so complex no-one understands them so they end up paying more tax than they ought to.

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

Hah. It's because they assume accountants' single aim is to depress profits to pay less tax, so they insist on creating new rules to get to what the accounting would be if it weren't done by accountants.

Predictably, what you get when you try to do a professional job in an amateur way is a mess ;-D

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

The end result of all this, of course, is that our tax system has now achieved a strange perverted sort of irreducible complexity: while you could, in theory, make it simple and logical, you'd put so many people (both in HMRC and in industry) out of work by doing so that you'd cause a horrendous and entirely avoidable recession, which is clearly a bad thing (tm).