It's the well-known paradox that, while there is such a thing as not enough money, there's no such thing as too much money.I don't get this avoiding tax idea. Frankly if I made enough money to pay a lot of tax on it, I'd still have a lot of money! I remember a few years ago I had the chance to make a bit of money on shares (didn't happen of course) and people were discussing the best way to avoid capital gains tax. I was perfectly happy to pay capital gains tax... because I was set to make far more than that!
It's the ridiculously wealthy that bother me the most. Many years ago (I'm sure it's got worse now) I did a three month temp job in the personal tax group of one of the really famous accountancy firms. These were people the fabulously wealthy employed for a huge amount of money to avoid a slightly larger amount of money going to the state. They would do legal (?) things like set up offshore companies that didn't really exist and these companies would have board meetings that nobody attended and I was employed among other things to produce the minutes of these non-existent meetings. This was 20 years ago - the situation is not going to have got better is it!
At the risk of quoting Stewart Lee and being mistaken for somebody who doesn't believe he's a self-important oaf who isn't actually particularly funny and was the weak link of Lee & Herring, he has this one routine where he outlines tax dodging as people earning a certain amount of money and then deciding "It's not their money, it's mine" and doing everything they can to keep every grubby penny they can.
Would it be churlish of me to mention so many BBC pundits are guilty of this, with Danny Murphy owing £2.5m while Martin Keown was fined an eye-watering £4.5m?
