Our tax system is a total mess
22 December 2011
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21 December 2011
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Economic Theory
25 June 2024
The kinds of negotiations and deals made between HMRC and large firms, which have been the subject of much attention lately, are essentially undesirable, especially when one compares this to the treatment of SMEs and individuals by HMRC.
However, they are inevitable given the kind of tax code we have. If we had a proper tax system that was simple and transparent then it would be pretty clear how much a company (or individual) owed and there would be no need for these negotiations. Given the total mess of a system that we have, negotiations of this kind are inevitable and better than the alternative.
This is because the system is so complicated that in many cases neither side can be sure what the true tax liability is – both are engaged in a ‘best guess’ exercise. Given that these are large firms, the sums involved are considerable.
A company advised by its lawyers that a tax estimate from HMRC was questionable would be failing in its legal duty if it did not seek to address this.
It is not possible to simply give the HMRC the power to set a tax bill that would simply stand without question because the opacity of the system we have means that estimates of this kind would have an arbitrary and uncertain quality which is very bad for business – firms would rather have high but certain taxes than unpredictable and inexplicable ones.
Moreover the real current alternative to negotiations is expensive and destabilising litigation, which will benefit neither the companies nor the Revenue.
Secretive negotiations of this kind undermine the rule of law and give large firms an advantage over small and medium sized ones. Large firms will quite honestly try to negotiate to establish their liability when the tax system is so unclear that nobody can act with any certainty. So we need to eliminate the need for these negotiations by reforming and simplifying the tax system.
This article was written for LondonLovesBusiness and can be read here.
However, they are inevitable given the kind of tax code we have. If we had a proper tax system that was simple and transparent then it would be pretty clear how much a company (or individual) owed and there would be no need for these negotiations. Given the total mess of a system that we have, negotiations of this kind are inevitable and better than the alternative.
This is because the system is so complicated that in many cases neither side can be sure what the true tax liability is – both are engaged in a ‘best guess’ exercise. Given that these are large firms, the sums involved are considerable.
A company advised by its lawyers that a tax estimate from HMRC was questionable would be failing in its legal duty if it did not seek to address this.
It is not possible to simply give the HMRC the power to set a tax bill that would simply stand without question because the opacity of the system we have means that estimates of this kind would have an arbitrary and uncertain quality which is very bad for business – firms would rather have high but certain taxes than unpredictable and inexplicable ones.
Moreover the real current alternative to negotiations is expensive and destabilising litigation, which will benefit neither the companies nor the Revenue.
Secretive negotiations of this kind undermine the rule of law and give large firms an advantage over small and medium sized ones. Large firms will quite honestly try to negotiate to establish their liability when the tax system is so unclear that nobody can act with any certainty. So we need to eliminate the need for these negotiations by reforming and simplifying the tax system.
This article was written for LondonLovesBusiness and can be read here.
3 thoughts on “Our tax system is a total mess”
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Agreed. Simple is good.
Another benefit of simplification is that if we rolled all existing taxes on income, profits and output (PAYE, income tax, corp tax, VAT) as well as WTC withdrawal into a single flat tax on all income, people would be horrified to see that the single flat rate is approx 50 per cent.
Of course, taxes on the rental value of land are better than taxes on income, profits or output.
Steve is quite right. In the course of writing a book about margins of error in accounting, I discovered that in 2006 both British American Tobacco and GlaxoSmithKline reported tax adjustments relating to previous years amounting to about 10 per cent of their annual tax charge. These are both huge multinationals (another reason for complexity in tax matters), and the absolute amounts involved were very large.
One difficulty with simplifying the UK tax system is that any significant change which is revenue-neutral is likely to lead to many ‘winners’ and many ‘losers’. Human nature being what it is, the losers will whinge about the changes much more vociferously than the winners will purr.
I conclude that significant tax simplification will be possible only if concurrently total tax revenues (now nearly 50 per cent of national income) are substantially reduced. But this requires (at least over the medium term) substantial reductions in government spending — which, as we all know, is politically tricky.
The only winners of a complex tax code are large corporations that can take advantages of its loopholes through complex structures that extract value of the ever-increasing complexity. Those are the ones that can efficiently invest its vast resources in exploiting the advantages. They have the economies of scale to deal with government!
New business school term: “government-driven economies of scale”.
So much for the political discourse of protecting the small enterprise,