Off Topic Ken Dodd died
- Thread starter Brian Storm
- Start date
I was investigated about 4 years ago took about 18 months before I found out the final result and they owed me £265 I felt well chuffed but its f ucking scary when they contact you they have already took your books from your accountant but they take them from 2 years ago so you can't remember what the f uck you booked in anyway and from then on they get every single account where you may have put money in and believe me they are bloody good. So anybody who is being investigated now don't worry 5 years in jail is not that bad.
Many years ago I was at a seminar, given by a large accountancy firm, where the speaker was their Senior Tax Advisor, a former Inland Revenue Inspector who had turned from being a 'Gamekeeper' to being a 'Poacher'.
Afterwards, at the chat tea and sarnie stage, I asked him what the Revenue looked for when hunting down evaders.
People who run a fish and chip shop, live in Cleadon, have no mortgage and pay little or no tax.
Variation on this theme, he said. They usually stand out a mile and are not difficult to spot.
Most people who are self employed try to 'minimise their Tax liability'
The ones that get caught, generally, are the ones who overdid it and got greedy.
It was once stated by a politician whose name escapes me that the only people who actually pay the tax that they owe are those that pay by PAYE..
I'm sure that you are correct.
However I have more sympathy than most with those that avoid tax by use of devious schemes dreamed up by their accountants.
That's why expensive Accountants exist. To minimise their Clients Tax Bill. As long as their schemes are legal, (and most are) then that's OK by me.
It's the job of the equally well paid Civil Servants in The Revenue and The Treasury to make sure that loopholes don't exist in the legislation to start with and to block such loopholes as soon as they appear.
They don't seem to be very good at either task, if the Press is to be believed.
In general, it seems, that the Accountants beat the Civil Servants most of the time.
The reason they are not illegal is because the people in power benefit from them.. The money lost through benefit fraud is absolutely tiny in comparison to so-called legal tax avoidence, and yet the resources that go into tracking benefit fraud is huge in comparison to that of closing loopholes..
Seem to remember an ex inspector say that their bonuses were based not on the amount of unpaid tax they recovered, but on the level of good relationship they had with their tax avoiding client. Well,as an inspector, how do you get a tax avoider to like you ...........
I don't see it as being a social/political issue.
After all during the last Labour Government things remained the same.
Similarly during the time that the Lib Dems had some sort of influence particularly through Vince Cable, there was no discernable change.
I take the more simplistic view that the Accountants are cleverer than the MP's and Civil Service Mandarins.
In the globalised economic climate with nations in competition with each other, it is easy for accountants to transfer money to offshore accounts.. There is also so many loopholes in the system were taxes can be off set against just about everything, that accoutants do have the upper hand..
As long as the government continue to allow entertainers etc to have their ''pay'' sent to an offshore ''company'' and then take it back as a 'loan' (which will never be repaid) from that company, every one of us should also be allowed to tell our employers to send our pay to where we instruct abroad.
From memory, so don't hold me to the dates and the Rates I've quoted are just to make the point rather that what applied then.
In the mid 70's, when hyper inflation was at full belt and the gold price was up in the stratosphere, it was 'rumoured' in the Press that some City firms had taken to paying their senior executives in sovereigns. The were said to be, technically, legal tender.
So if they were due, say £1000 a month, (I would be happy to be getting a lot less than that a year then), they would instead receive say ten Sovs, which their firm would offer to buy from them at the going rate of £100 each
The benefit was that they only paid tax on £10, rather than on £1000.
I don't remember how they got round the Capital Gains, but that was achieved too.
I believe that a quickie Bill through Parliament put a stop to the scheme, but I for one was very impressed with the lateral thinking that had been shown.
I've been a tax accountant for 34 years and the main reasons people avoid tax are (1) because successive governments have never simplified the system and where you have a complex set of written rules set out in over 12,000 pages of legislation and regulations you get "loopholes" & (2) because people simply don't tell the taxman the whole story, usually because they think tax rates are too high (the avoidance industry started in the 70s when the top rate of income tax was as high as 98%, so they had a point). Anyone wants to know the ins and outs let me know, but it's fairly tedious stuff for a football forum!