One thing I can (legally) say from experience is there are two types of people you regularly see appear in tax-dodging schemes: people in football, and people who work for the BBC, plus the obvious venn diagram of the former and the latter For example, remember four or five years ago when Alex Ferguson, Wayne Rooney and Martin Keown were all named as using the same scheme? I knew about that at least two years before it came out, because one of the names on the list was regularly calling the office due to being under investigation and trying to get his repayments significantly reduced
Couldn't agree more. It's off topic, but personally I once owned a share which was slated to be worth multiples of what I paid for it should X happen (needless to say it didn't). Point is that many of the conversations on the relevant discussion boards where how unfair it was to tax profits from this. My opinion was that if I had made that sort of money, I really didn't mind paying tax on my profit as I would still have rather a lot of money I didn't have to work that hard for. Of course I worked for the initial stake, but after that I didn't really have to work for any multiples of that stake other than put it in the share instead of the bank. I get the impression that some people don't really believe they should pay tax, whist I believe it's only a fair contract between me and the state for which I'm defended, policed, nursed back to health etc. So sad that so many people don't think the same way.
There's also a very basic point about all this tax avoidance (or is it evasion, never can remember the difference, though I don't really see any myself). If someone can afford to pay an organisation to minmise or avoid their tax, they can afford to pay that tax.
1. Tax evasion is CRIMINAL, tax avoidance is not. 2. Tax avoidance is the application of all current tax law, to the letter (rather than the spirit that typically spawn the laws) , in order to minimise ones' tax liabilities. Another more telling fact (known by those that seek to have just a cursory understanding of the reality) is that the govt annual "tax gap" reports show that for quite some time : perceived tax revenue loss (evasion) >= 4 x perceived tax revenue loss (avoidance) That, together with : RE = TCOA(recover £1 of evaded tax revenue) RA = TCOA(recover £1 of avoided tax revenue) where TCOA = 'total cost of achievement' and the belief (held by myself and others) that RE < RA then it becomes very clear what is operationally most expedient, and what is just politics that can be dealt with once the lower hanging fruit is picked.
I've got no idea what drives that behaviour. However I used to have a policy of not claiming gift aid for charitable donations as I felt I could afford to pay the difference better than the average tax payer. However with the current shower in charge I reckon I trust my judgement on what to spend that gift aid money on better than the Government's. That could be seen as a similar position I suppose. People with money need to recognise that they will have acquired a lot of it by luck even if hard work is required too and try to give something back to society.
I've seen it quoted many times that uncollected tax dwarfs social security fraud. But HMRC are continually starved of resources to go after the tax. I think there is a grey area between evasion and avoidance where clever lawyers try to find ways of avoiding tax which would undoubtedly have been outlawed if only Parliament had thought of the scheme first. The EFRBS scheme used by footballers and others is a very good example of this. You set up an EFRBS trust which is basically a pension scheme that doesn't need to be regulated and pay most of the salary into it. Then the trust decides to lend the money to the employee on commercial terms, with any interest added to the loan. The effect was that there was a perpetual loan of most of the salary which didn't attract income tax. The law was soon changed and the scheme doesn't work any more. But it is so artificial that I think the new approach of having a general anti avoidance law is justified.
Even more telling is the fact that according to the "tax gap" reports, evasion is not even in the top 3 purported tax leaks. What are, however, is very concerning for the "little man" (strengthened by info I have been given by those ITK on HMRC mentality) . "I think there is a grey area between evasion and avoidance where clever lawyers try to find ways of avoiding tax which would undoubtedly have been outlawed if only Parliament had thought of the scheme first. ... " < chairman deedub > Pay peanuts, get monkeys. The state should be paying top money to a select few to do "war gaming" (ie they are counterparts of "white hat hackers" in the CIT sectors) . These people should continually be randomly picking an industry sector, be given a copy of Tolleys, and tasked with producing an optimal tax liability regime, to the letter of the law, for a business in said sector. Where the regime analysis shows obvious spirit of some laws, then the law must be changed ASAP. Of course, if like me the state decreed to codify all tax law as a dependency graph, then they would have instant impact assessment of any changes.
Think David Cameron. Keep the gravy train running, then board it when you quit politics. Of course, you might not know which gravy train you'll be on, so make sure the rich in business carry on being rich - don't upset any of them on the way.
I think that's literally the last position that I want us to spend money on at the moment. We've got Lo Celso, Ndombele and Alli, as well as Devine and White in the academy. It's also a position that we've played without for most of the season, so far. Back-up striker, another holding midfielder and a creative deep-lying midfielder, for me. Centre-half too, if we can ship out someone from that area.
weve got names but none of them can do the required task and we suffer for it in every single game if shots at goal and clear cut chances are anything to go by. Yeah the stats were better against Villa. Truth is Villa aren’t all that, it’s us, we have regressed. When we play the Chavs, Goons and such like we look shy upfront and clueless when it comes to breaking them down. A deep lying playmaker…we could have had Sabitzer…he does that role but we have no direction and vision as a club so he slipped the net…this was just over a year back. Maybe we need more than one position filling up with real quality…I think that’s the truth of it.
Villa was the first game that we actually played an attacking midfielder in, I think. I say I think because I'm not 100% sure that's what the manager set us up with. Ndombele may have been playing there or he could've been on the left and just indisciplined. It's a position that I think we need to use and the three that we've got can do different jobs there. It all depends on the opposition and who else is in our lineup. The roles that Skipp and Hojbjerg are currently filling have very little in the way of backup, though. Winks can sort of do a job there for one of them and Nile John might be able to cover that one, too. There's nobody to fill in for the other one though and it's important to every system we've used.
