Poll on attitudes to tax

[king_pellinor]

"Taxation" magazine is doing a survey to see if the public's attitude to tax avoidance/evasion/planning is what the Government thinks it is.  Can I ask people to have a quick go at it, to inform the debate a bit?  It's all anonymous.

http://bit.ly/TaxHowFar

Comments

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

Strictly, chocolate and cheese may well be taxable.

Hard to declare, as you say, and determining the market value of a lump of second-hand cheese is tricky, but still taxable.

[pellegrina.livejournal.com]

But presumably there is still a distinction between income and gift giving, and a grey area? I would have gladly given a tithe of cheese to HMRC, since it went mouldy faster than I could eat it. But they'd have had to accept payment in kind.

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

Not really, no. If you get given something in return for doing your job, that's job-related income and so it's taxable. HMRC will sometimes accept a tithe (several tithes, really) of shares or loan notes, but I've not heard of them taking the cheese :-)

In practice it normally slides, but theory's a different matter.

[pellegrina.livejournal.com]

The cheese was definitely more of a gift - a student I'd been especially helpful to brought it on her next visit to London. I am sure there are people who abuse this as they seem to abuse everything else, but I can't help feeling that too much breathing down the neck of the gift economy impoverishes us morally.

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

Oh, I agree.

The problem is where you draw the line, and I think HMRC are as guilty of abusing the rules in one direction as some taxpayers are in the other. Especially as they get to do the line-drawing...

[chainmailmaiden]

I find it easiest to distinguish between gifts & income in the same way I distinguish whether something is a contract or a gift. Income/contracts consideration is exchanged. Gifts, consideration goes in one direction only.

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

That's a good distinction.

HMRC would say though that you can count consideration which has already been given in the other direction: so if you give someone a lump of cheese becauseyou appreciate the work they did for you a few months ago, it's additional consideration for that work.

Even if you're not their employer - we're talking about the recipient's income, not necessarily any contract between you and them. They've received salary plus cheese for doing their job, and so should be taxed on both salary and cheese.

HMRC are unlikely to take the point unless the cheese is abusive, though.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

I am amused by the idea of an abusive cheese.

[adaese.livejournal.com]

When I worked in the book trade, publishers would routinely give us lunches and marketing tie-ins (I went about five years without having to buy a single T-shirt). These were all declared to the company, and I never thought to ask how payroll handled the tax thereon - I just trusted them to deal with it.

When I worked at the university, some of the companies we had dealings with gave us Christmas presents. These all went into a departmental stash, and were divided up between everyone just before we broke up for Christmas. I would quite happily have given the entire bottle of Lithuanian "brandy" to HMRC, if they would have accepted it - I think it all went into cooking in the end.