Archive for the ‘HMRC’ Category

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Good news, bad news?

July 14, 2017

Great news yesterday, with the announcement that Making Tax Digital has been postponed and that only businesses with a turnover over the VAT threshold will have to keep digital records until, well, this government has either gone or has consolidated itself enough to be able to get the legislation through.

This is the best of all possible worlds – or at least it is at first sight.  Because of course HMRC needs to have a modern computer system that isn’t held together with string, prayer and for all I know a couple of  floppy disks.  Of course we should be able to log on and see our tax returns already pre-populated with the information HMRC already knows about us, the stuff from our P60s and bank interest and what have you.  MTD is a customer service imperative.

The problem is that the Treasury won’t pay for that kind of thing: it had to be pitched as a project that would pay for itself, and that’s when you get into the ridiculousness of trying to make teeny tiny businesses that keep perfectly adequate paper records move online or perish, in the absurd belief they’ve all got seventeen grand or so stuffed down the back of the sofa.

So keep the good stuff, the modernisation of the online interface, and ditch the bad, the mandation/penalty routine?

I wish.  The HMRC annual report and accounts for 2016/17 came out yesterday.  I know it’s a couple of hundred pages so I can’t pretend to have done more than skimmed it so far, but for me the key question is this:

do they still get the money?

Does HMRC still get the funding to upgrade its computers to MTD and to do the necessary work on pre-population without the spurious promise of resultant tax gap closure?  I can’t tell from the accounts.  Did they get MTD funds in 16/17 and will they get the rest in 17/18 and beyond.  I can’t tell.

Anyone?

Posted in HMRC, HMT, MTD (Making Tax Digital) | Leave a Comment »

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Legislative v administrative

June 12, 2017

There’s a hung parliament.  Things are moving quickly: in my head, I imagine someone taking on a new job, running “legislative affairs” like Josh Lyman  in the West Wing.  Someone whose job it is to ring round the new MPs to see if they will stand for this policy or that, as each new idea for the Queen’s Speech has to be fought through separately.

Leaving aside my fantasies about there being someone competent and grown up behind the scenes, let’s look for a moment at what a hung parliament means for taxes?

Three things.  First of all, there’s unlikely to be any huge legislative change.  It’s entirely possible that the proposals to make it compulsory for businesses to keep their records on an app or computer programme and update HMRC four (five?) times a year, MTD (“Making Tax Digital”) for short, will fall.  Why would anyone back MTD when it is going to be as popular as a cup of cold sick with small businesses once they learn how it will affect them?  Kick it down the road and make it Someone Else’s Problem, would be my instinct.

Second, the difficulty in making legislative change is unlikely to apply to actual tax rates: there are different rules.  But then why would a “continuity” government want to change the rates they themselves introduced five minutes ago?  They may have to give sweeties to their supporters (abolition of APD for Northern Ireland, would be my best guess from the weekend press).

But the third thing is that administratively, things will carry on much as before.  The rule for the Civil Service is to carry on doing your job until someone tells you differently.  So the idiotic decision to carry on with the “building our futures” plan and move HMRC into big lumps instead of a distributed network of local offices will probably carry on.  There will be a new Minister, after all.  (Jane Ellison lost her seat so there will be a new Financial Secretary to the Treasury but at the time of writing I can’t see an announcement of who replaces her) so there is no-one with a vested interest in saying “no” and the inertia of “keep calm and carry on” may let this go through.

I think that’s a shame: you may not. But what IS a shame is that there will be no will to change the way policy is made. When the coalition government came in there was a will to do things differently and the political space to think them through . No-one had a vested interest in continuity but in Getting Things Done. So we had Making Tax Policy Better and the invention of the TIIN. Sigh. Ah well, business as usual, at least for a while.

 

 

Posted in Bit of politics, HMRC, TIINs, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

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Going postal

June 7, 2017

Imagine you’d agreed to become a school governor. Only at a meeting the day before you joined, they decided to sell off the playing fields, appoint a new headmaster and turn the school into an academy. You’d be a bit miffed, right? Because you agreed to help with the running of a school but they made it into a completely different kind of school before you had a chance to influence its direction.

It’s an analogy. The real thing is here – the report in Civil Service World that says HMRC has signed contracts for new premises during the pre-election “purdah” period. It is no secret that I think HMRC’s “Building our Futures” plan to close down its local network and move to massive regional centres is a bad idea (see here, here and here for example).

It’s also no secret that HMRC has a truly awful record of negotiating property deals (see the Mapeley deal, where it sold and leased back its own buildings via an offshore entity) and it has been reported, for “Building our Futures” that HMRC has signed inflation linked 25 year contracts with no break. Seriously? 25 years ago I was working in HMRC and we were worrying about whether we had the right number of smoking rooms and filing space, and were there enough plugs for the new computers – who knows what accommodation will be appropriate for whatever the revenue authority looks like in 2042!

HMRC get a bad idea and run with it – nothing particularly new there (VATMOSS, MTD…) but this is the day before a bloody election. If there’s a new government on Friday they may well want to look again at how HMRC is organised. Having the civil service distributed in local offices amongst the people they serve is, surely, a better way of organising society than corralling them all into Fortresses Of Doom. Signing contracts in the quiet period before an election is shocking, and has the appearance of an attempt to railroad the new government into acting on a bad idea of the old. If there’s a different government on Friday I hope the first thing they do is repudiate any such contracts, discipline the people who signed them, and have a proper look at how a modern government delivers its services.

Posted in Bit of politics, HMRC | Leave a Comment »

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Writing to your MP

April 12, 2017

My MP is Nick Clegg, the former Deputy Prime Minister.  He has a pretty good office set up, so that when constituents write to him there is usually some kind of action taken. I took my own advice and wrote to him about MTD, specifically about the TIIN not supporting the change and asking him to make this point in the debates on the legislation.

What his office actually did, of course, was send my email on to the Treasury and then send me the reply.

Here are some extracts from that reply:

I am pleased that your constituent agrees that the overall direction of travel towards a more digital tax system is the right one.

I have already written about that one: practically everyone who replied to the consultation used the tried and trusted formula of “yes, and, but-”

The Government has listened carefully to the wide range of views put forward about the MTDfB proposals. Most commentators were positive about the vision of a fully digital tax system that matches what we are increasingly used to from interactions with other service providers.

Yes, that’s the “yes” part of the argument. Yes of course the UK should invest in a modern digital HMRC. Give HMRC the money to improve its service and we’ll applaud.

However the speed of implementation, and the capability of those in scope to adapt, alongside the costs of doing so, were all key areas of feedback.

This is the point at which the letter stops being a response to the points I actually raised and becomes a generic. I asked about the TIIN not providing evidence that the rewards of mandation justified the costs.

In response, the Chancellor announced at Spring Budget 2017 a significant change to the timetable, which will give unincorporated businesses (including landlords and the self-employed) more time to prepare for the changes. Those below the VAT threshold will not have to keep digital records and update HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) quarterly until April 2019. As well as giving them (and their agents) more time to prepare, it will also ensure two full years of testing of the new system and services before they become mandatory for this group. The Government has already responded to other areas of feedback, such as exempting those with an annual turnover below £10,000 from mandatory use, making free software available for the smallest businesses with the most straightforward affairs, and accepting the continued use of spreadsheets (as long as they fully meet the key MTDfB requirements) as a form of digital record.

Sorry, but this is more boilerplate blah, not responding to the actual point at all.

Let me also set out why we are proceeding with these important reforms. The Government is investing significant sums to improve the tax system for all taxpayers, and deliver a modern digital service. There is a growing appetite for this, with millions already using their digital tax accounts to view their liabilities and payments, to claim back overpaid tax, or renew their tax credits.

Now we’re getting somewhere: we’ve had the “yes” and a bit of the “and” – now let’s see if there’s any response to the “but…”

While most businesses want to get their tax right, the amount of tax not collected due to taxpayer error and carelessness is now around £8 billion a year. This not only costs the Exchequer, but it also causes businesses cost, uncertainty and worry when HMRC has to intervene to put things right. MTDfB will reduce the tax gap caused by error by requiring businesses to keep a digital record of their income and expenditure, using software or an app, and to update HMRC quarterly with a summary of that data.

Will it, though? Will recording in an app or online actually cut down on errors and mistakes or will it add more and interesting ways to make errors? And where does the figure of £8 billion come from and how is it calculated? At the same time as Nick Clegg was sending on this correspondence, HMRC were responding directly to me on my FoI request for the underlying computations producing the figure for tax allegedly lost. In summary: they still say no.

Your constituent suggests that MTDfB should be a voluntary scheme. These reforms will deliver a better and more modern customer experience for businesses, where they can do everything they need to digitally. They will have greater certainty over their tax affairs, confidence that they have got things right, and a clearer in-year picture of their evolving tax position, allowing them to plan their cash flow more effectively. More timely digital record keeping will lead to fewer errors, thereby reducing the likelihood of an unwanted HMRC intervention. A voluntary scheme would deliver only a fraction of these benefits.

Would it, though?  If MTD is really going to be a better way, wouldn’t people want to gain the alleged benefits by joining it?Or are we not talking about benefits to the taxpayer at all, but this mythical seventeen grand all small businesses have lost down the back of the sofa?

I would like to reassure your constituent that quarterly updates do not amount to quarterly tax returns. The software will produce a summary of income and expenditure for the quarter using the information that the business has already recorded, and prompt them to send that to HMRC. The update process will be light touch, not at all equivalent to the current annual tax return. There is no requirement for the update to be done by an agent, no penalty for inaccuracy in the update, and no requirement to pay alongside the update.

Are you reassured? I’m not reassured, not even a little bit.

HMRC is introducing the changes gradually, and piloting them thoroughly before mandatory use begins in April 2018 for unincorporated businesses above the VAT threshold. HMRC is running a large-scale pilot and plans to test with several hundred thousand businesses by March 2018, including those who do not currently use software at all, or who may be less confident in moving to digital.

March 2018 is just next year. Where is the software? Where do people sign up? How long will the trial last and when will the results be out? How will success be measured and who will do the measuring? There just plain isn’t *time* to do a proper trial before mandation kicks in.

At Spring Budget 2017, HMRC published an updated impact note for Making Tax Digital (MTD). The changes will reduce error on an ongoing basis by around 10%. MTD will contribute an additional £1.9 billion to the public purse over the next 5 years and just under £1 billion per year thereafter.

They’re called TIINs. This one doesn’t show that the benefits justify the cost. (It really doesn’t. It shows them as the same, with the costs front loaded and the theoretical benefits off some time in the fuzzy future. You wouldn’t buy a fridge on that basis, let alone an intrusive system that will make digital slaves of half the nation.)

We recognise that there will be costs in the transitional period for some businesses, while also recognising that all businesses are different. Transitional costs may be lower for businesses already using digital tools, or where they are eligible to use free software. Businesses that have limited existing digital capability may need to purchase hardware and software, so initial costs may be higher, but net savings will start to be made from 2021-22 onwards. HMRC will ensure that the transition to digital is as smooth as possible and is committed to making MTDfB work for its customers, modernising its services for the benefit of all UK taxpayers.

Boilerplate blah, nothing to do with anything I had asked.

HMRC will start to ramp up its communication activity to raise awareness amongst the business community during the live trial. Agents and the software industry will be key partners in achieving this. As the different start dates for different sizes of business approach, HMRC will ensure those affected by the changes are aware of any new obligations. As with any change to the way people interact with the tax system, HMRC will focus on making sure customers have the right information well in advance of any changes coming into effect.

Because HMRC has a long history of being good at this kind of thing, right? I mean, right??

Please pass on my thanks to Ms Bradley for taking the trouble to make us aware of these concerns.

JANE ELLISON

*Clutches head in hands and weeps* 

Posted in HMRC, MTD (Making Tax Digital), TIINs | Leave a Comment »

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The oncoming storm

April 6, 2017

HMRC has a long record of enforcing compliance with direct taxes by hitting taxpayers with a bigger and bigger financial stick until they engage. Readers with long memories may recall the old method of estimated assessment, where a tax return was obtained by estimating income and profits and, if no return was received, estimating next years’ higher and higher and higher until finally we had little old ladies with tens of thousands of pounds of alleged income in tears on the doorsteps of accountants.

More recently there were cases of absurd penalties racking up under the C.I.S. system. And there is of course the notorious hundred pound penalty for failure to submit a tax return on time. This began as the lesser of £100 or the tax due: now it is simply £100 even if your tax bill as a result of the return is zero.

It is my contention that HMRC has very little understanding of the ecology of taxpayers with earnings at or around the nil rate band limit. This was evidenced in the last few years in the VATMOSS debacle (this blog, ad nauseam) where the tax authorities failed to engage with the very smallest digital entrepreneurs, principally because they had no idea that such businesses existed in the first place. The HMRC stakeholder model makes it hard for such people to engage because on an individual basis it takes up too much time and energy to deal with HMRC one-on-one, and none of the existing stakeholder organisations represent such businesses: the entry level for the Federation of Small Businesses, for example, at £99 for a start up or £172 thereafter, is prohibitively expensive if one is earning 10,000 a year.

So if we accept that HMRC’s pattern is to use disproportionate financial penalties on small businesses and it has little understanding of the very lowest earner, it is easy to see how the disastrous affair of the tax credits outsourcing program came to be. The PAC report published today goes into full detail but there are a couple of additional points worth noting.

Firstly the outsourcing of work which ought rightfully to be done by the civil service. It has always been thought morally dubious (and in my opinion rightly) to outsource the collection of tax to a profit making entity. How is it not incorrect, therefore, similarly to outsource the payment of small amounts to the poorest members of society?

Secondly there is the question of control of contracts and external work. As you will know, I am not sanguine about the possibility of Making Tax Digital for Business working as intended and this is largely because HMRC have over the years lost their in-house expertise in dealing with computerisation. Combine this with the rumoured walking away of their own consultants because of the changes to IR35 rules, it looks as though the problems with tax credit payments are merely a foreshadowing of a shit storm heading HMRC’s way.

Posted in Digital, HMRC | Leave a Comment »

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How to prepare a TIIN: the tax impact assessment

February 10, 2017

You may remember that I asked HMRC for the current guidance on how to prepare a TIIN (this was published here on my blog) but that the guidance referred to further guidance on how to do the tax impact assessment part of the process.  I have now received, by way of a further FoI request, the attached tia guidance

Note that the “redacted” areas are where the names of the particular officials responsible for different policy areas have been redacted.  Apparently the “more” areas refer to links to further internal guidance which was not considered to be covered by the scope of my FoI request.

More interesting, though, is the response I had to my question of why this guidance is not part of HMRC’s routine publication schedule, particularly as the TIIN is the tax version of a Regulatory Impact Assessment, and the RIA guidance and instructions are routinely published.

We have not published this guidance routinely for two reasons. Firstly it does not affect the computation of the tax that a customer pays and is therefore of interest only to a small community. Secondly, as you point out, it mirrors cross government impact assessment guidance for internal HMRC use and is not intended to materially differ from it, except to the extent that the impact assessments provided for tax provisions are presented in TIINs, and to explain to HMRC staff how to engage the right processes to generate the impacts.

Hmmmm… I am tempted to point out that another possible reason could be that other government departments’ impact assessments are subject to external scrutiny.  As impact assessment programme manager in HMRC, my job for several years included going to cross governmental meetings and saying (in effect) no, hands off, tax is different!  These days?  I’m not so convinced…

Posted in HMRC, TIINs | 1 Comment »

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Yes, and, but.

February 3, 2017

Is there a communications manager for Making Tax Digital yet?  Because – apologies if there is – but it seems to me the communications so far have been, well, pants.  Apparently we are no longer MTE (Making Tax Easier) or even Making Tax Digital (MTD) for example, but “MTDfB”.  This inelegant acronym stands for “Making Tax Digital for Businesses”, presumably because we don’t want to frighten the taxpayers horses by suggesting that pensioners and others on PAYE will have to play.  Yet.

More importantly, there seems to be no plan to communicate with anyone outside the rather small circle of people who are already tax mavens, with those unrepresented businesses who will be hardest hit by the changes.  You don’t believe me?  Put “making tax digital” into google and hit the tab for “news”.  There is virtually nothing in the general press, although the professional press is of course full of it – but no-one at HMRC is, seemingly, listening to them.

Look, there’s a serious misunderstanding here.  The consultation response says that “respondents overwhelmingly support the move to a digital tax system.”  No, it’s a recognised letter-writing technique.  You don’t think your bank really means you’re “dear” to them when they write to you, do you?

Well, generations of people have been trained to deliver unpleasant messages using the format “yes, and, but…”  You start off by finding a point of commonality, something you can agree on.  (Yes, it would be good if HMRC had a modern computer system.)  Then you go on to add something else you think you can agree on.  (Yes, it would be great if tax returns were prepopulated with the information HMRC already holds) and only then do you deliver the unwelcome message. (But making it compulsory to keep electronic records and update four times a year are terrible ideas!)

Yes, and, but.

It’s plain as the nose on your face if you look at the Treasury Select Committee’s report which helpfully summarises the responses under the heading “support for the principle” – yes, we welcome the digital principle, and we think the changes go with the grain of progress BUT… we’re worried about the timetable, about the lack of free software, and above all about mandation.

The whole basis of the current proposal is undermined in HMRC’s own Impact assessment.  The projected extra tax in this parliament (to 20-21) is £945m. The projected extra costs to business in the same period? £920m.  Extraordinarily, the impact assessment quantifies no costs for HMRC for the proposal, although the original consultation document justified mandation by saying that without it “the return on the £1.3bn investment in transforming tax administration would not have been realised” (para 2.6)

In short, HMRC, your comms are pants, you have misunderstood people’s feedback, and your numbers don’t add up.  Sorry and all that.

Posted in HMRC, MTD (Making Tax Digital) | 2 Comments »

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MTD, the response documents

January 31, 2017

Well, here we go: the responses to MTD are now live.  There’s a ton of stuff to read, so I’m going to post my immediate responses “live” as I go through them.  Watch this space! (or, temporarily turn off notifications if you get update notices)

  1. The overview.  It’s not easy to find.  Starting from the “consultations” page on gov.uk I got all excited when today’s list showed MTD updated 31 January.  But when you go to it, it’s not immediately obvious what’s been updated at all.  The actual response document is linked from the paragraph that reads

Over 1,200 people responded to this online survey and individual responses were fed into the other consultations to support the government’s thinking. Many of the responses helped influence key outcomes.

Now, maybe it’s just me, but I wouldn’t immediately have thought that “other consultations to support the government’s thinking” was a signal for “look!  Here’s the responses doc!” (updated 3.20pm)

2. Ah!  I see!  There’s an overview document (like there was for the original pack of consultations)  Right then: here’s a link to the overview.  Speed reading: first reaction?  Great flying spaghetti monster but it’s a complacent piece of spin.  Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and a committee of MPs has published a report but we’ve addressed “many” of their recommendations.  (As I recall, the Treasury Select Committee report wasn’t happy at all).  Not sanguine!

3.40 pm.  Aha!  I just had an email from the MTD correspondence address:

Dear stakeholder,

Thank you for responding to our consultations on Making Tax Digital last year. We’re extremely pleased with the level of response to the consultations and grateful for the time and effort that you took to send us your views.

A summary of feedback received, the government’s decisions and our next steps have been published today in six response documents on GOV.UK. If you’re short of time, we’ve also published a short overview which draws out the key conclusions from each of the consultations.

Over the consultation period, we held a number of events with interested parties to communicate and discuss the proposals, including face-to-face meetings, and webinars for the public and tax agents, which attracted over 3,000 participants. HMRC also attended a range of conferences and events to reach as many stakeholders as possible. Feedback from these events has also been considered as part of the formal consultation exercise.

Your input is important as it has not only informed the development of policy and draft legislation, but has also helped give us a clearer understanding of the needs of our customers as we implement Making Tax Digital.

Thank you again for your participation.

Jim Harra

Director General, Customer Strategy and Tax Design, HMRC

Onwards!  Next reading: the revised impact assessment.

4. The impact assessment.  Er, the admin burden savings figures have been revised.  A lot.  And, lo!  The transitional costs of £100m, £500m and £350m to 2020 add up to £950m.  Now, where have I seen that figure before…????

The MTDfB changes will contribute £945 million to the Exchequer by 2020 to 2021.

Oh yeah, that was it.

Posted in HMRC, MTD (Making Tax Digital) | 2 Comments »

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Tax return (MTD will be different, right?)

January 31, 2017

Yes, I did my tax return (two days before the deadline in fact!  Yay me!)

Have I achieved Inner Peace?  Hell no!

The problem was that I had signed up for a personal tax account earlier in the year. I’d been deeply annoyed to find that, having done so, I could get details of my national insurance payments back to the 1970s but I couldn’t get into my tax returns. This apparently was because I had signed up to the self assessment service with different details. This was a baffling message to me (you only have one UTR, after all).

So I spent twenty minutes going round in circles with the website trying to find out how to get back to the familiar landing page for self assessment and getting frequent messages on my mobile with a six digit number to log back into my personal tax account. In the end I found, more or less by accident, that I could sign up again using the log in details I found at the front of my account book, but then had to go through the whole verify-yourself-by-handing-over-your-passport-details thing (how on earth do people who *don’t* have a passport do it?  It isn’t compulsory to have a passport, after all)

Well, long story short, I made it into the self assessment service…

…and then, after I had entered my return details and checked the tax calculation, I thought I would pay up.  Yes, more yelling profanities at my computer screen, because what kind of evil genius designs a programme that works out how much you have to pay, takes three or four clicks to get you to the place that you actually pay, and then presents you with a blank “amount” field?  I mean, carry the figure over from one screen to another, it’s not rocket science surely?

This is what I wrote on twitter:

 

I think the problem is simply that the reassuringly familiar architecture of the self assessment system is still there, but a shiny new “personal tax account” front page has been cobbled together onto the front of it.  It works, just about, but it’s a cheapskate spatchcocked hotchpotch.

Posted in HMRC, two fingers of tax | Leave a Comment »

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Tax simplification and better regulation.

January 18, 2017

My PhD-in-progress asks the question whether using better regulation techniques produces tax simplification, a question to which the glib answer is, of course, “it would, if they did”. So in keeping with the Making Tax Policy Better report and the suggestion that this is just the start of a conversation, I have been wondering what progress we might make towards a simpler tax system by making better use of the tools we already have.

Look, for example, at the 51 TIINs published on 5 December to support the draft 2017 Finance Bill.  If you take these and put them into a spreadsheet, listing the three quantifiable fields (exchequer impact, administrative burden and HMRC costs) what do you find?

The measures fall into three crude categories.  Firstly, there are those measures whose overall impact will be greater than £100 million.  Insurance Premium Tax: increase of standard rate, for example, or Abolition of Class 2 National Insurance contributions.  The Chancellor must be allowed to determine how and where he raises the money he needs to fund the expenditure he incurs: decisions about these large measures is political, and we can leave them alone for these purposes.

Secondly there are the measures which have smaller impacts. Personal Tax: changes to bands for ultra-low emission vehicles in company car tax for example will raise some tax, save some admin burden and cost HMRC some money.  Personally if I were an MP debating the Finance Bill I would want these relatively trivial measures to balance out: I would only allow as many measures which increase tax by amounts less than £100m as there were measures which decreased tax or administrative burden by similar amounts.  I suspect if this balance were demanded, the number of such measures might significantly decrease.

Finally there is the category to which I would wish to draw your attention today.  There are fully twenty measures where, so far as I can see, the exchequer effect (the actual tax raised or foregone) is zero, and both the administrative burden on taxpayers and the cost increases or savings for HMRC are either nil or negligible.

The question then is – why the hell are we doing them?  Here is a random selection:

Tobacco Duty: Illicit Trade Protocol – licensing of tobacco manufacturing machinery is a provision to licence tobacco manufacturing machinery.

Co-ownership authorised contractual schemes: reducing tax complexity seems to be a tidying-up of capital allowance rules for operators of co-ownership authorised contractual schemes (CoACS) and their investors, and yet will have a “negligible” impact on the tax they pay or on their administrative costs.

Landfill Tax: definition of taxable disposal will affect approximately 150 specialist disposal firms in England (the tax is or will be devolved in Scotland and Wales) and they will “incur negligible on-going savings through the removal of the requirement to inform HMRC about certain non-taxable activities.”  (HMRC couldn’t have just written them a letter??)

The Treasury and HMRC have an easier ride than other Departments in getting legislation before Parliament: they do not have to bid for space in the legislative programme, and Finance Bills are counted as “money bills” and subject to an easier passage through Parliament as the Lords can only delay rather than amend them.  There is a broad definition of “money bills”  which includes one “which in the opinion of the Speaker of the House of Commons contains only provisions dealing with … the imposition, repeal, alteration, or regulation of taxation…”  Perhaps someone should have a word with John Bercow?  It seems to me that, were he to declare that in his opinion no measure which produces neither tax, administrative burden saving nor government cost saving was a provision regulating taxation… and therefore no Finance Bill containing such measures could be certified as a money bill…

…well, perhaps he might, at a stroke, become tax personality of the year for his services to simplification of the tax system?

Posted in Bit of politics, Budget, HMRC, HMT, TIINs | 2 Comments »

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