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Equal pay day

November 9, 2015

Today, Monday 9th November, is “equal pay day”.  The argument is that effectively women are now working for nothing for the remainder of the year, as women’s salaries are on average 14.2% lower than men’s.

You can read more about this in The Independent, and there is a handy guide to negotiating your pay rise in The Guardian and on taking the legal route in The Telegraph.  And don’t forget I’ve banged on about it before here and here and here.

But WHY, forty five years after the passage of the first Equal Pay Act, have we not achieved equal pay?  Well, in public services things are getting worse, largely because of the 1% cap on public sector pay rises and the obsession with wiping out increments – which would be fine, if it weren’t for the awkward fact that it means everyone is stuck on the point on the pay scale they were at when the music stopped, so people are doing identical jobs for widely different salaries (because they no longer progress over time to “the rate for the job”)

No, I don’t have a wrap-it-up positive ending for you.  But sometimes there are men who stand up and say “it’s not fair” and thank goodness for them.  If you’re a man, try being that guy.  If you’re a woman – take the rest of the day off.

Posted in Equality | Leave a Comment »

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Tax gaps

October 30, 2015

Last week we had publication of the 2015 iteration of the HMRC Tax Gaps figures with accompanying methodology.  Note the plural: HMRC Tax Gaps, plural, and not a singular “tax gap”.  We’ll come back to that.

Let’s start with the methodological annexe.  In it there are five methods described.  They are:

  • Data matching
  • Top down methods
  • Management information
  • Random enquiries
  • Illustrative

Now let me start by saying I’m not a statistician nor an economist.  I’m a retired tax inspector with reasonable numeracy but that’s it: no superpowers, sorry, just a large pinch of salt which I can’t help applying to anything anyone tells me.  I have been vaguely aware for some time of the various controversies about the size of the tax gaps so these five methods interest me.  Let’s take a closer look.

“Top down methods” seem to be a method useful for indirect tax (what we might call the ex-Customs taxes).  It seems reasonable to use external data sources to work out how much of a given taxable product is consumed.  Working out what the VAT/excise duty etc would be on that level of consumption is just arithmetic, and then looking at how much is actually collected gives you the gap.  The tax gap is then the difference between how much VAT you’d collect if it was properly calculated and paid over on all the (say) beer sold in the year and the amount actually collected.

“Random enquiries” is a phrase used in tax investigations.  While most HMRC enquiries are based either on intelligence or else on the statistical information and other anomalous data ground out of the department’s giant number crunching machines, there are a few which are based on, well, pot luck.  What better way is there to check the integrity of your target selection and the results of those targeted investigations than to check a few cases at random and see how they compare?  Personally I think there’s a strong case to be made for far more random enquiries (takes the heat out of the transaction, levels the playing field by making sure the hard cases don’t get screened out) but I think the data from random enquiries is a useful contribution to measuring the direct tax gap – if x% of the random cases have errors producing amount £y, you could extrapolate what that amount of tax you were missing across the entire population, all things being equal.

“Management information” is information taken from HMRC’s internal systems.  Now, this is where I throw my first pinch of salt into this.  I have worked in HMRC.  I have contributed at the grass roots level to the management information available in HMRC.  I have argued with managers over the years about the management information collected in HMRC, in particular when detailed data is required from busy people where no benefit accrues to them from its collection, such as in the old fashioned ways HMRC used to collect data about the use of time of its inspectors.  I am sure HMRC’s internal systems are operated with integrity and provide the best data they can provide.  But I also suspect they may sometimes produce the same kind of data as you get from opinion polling or question setting in Pointless.  In other words, without a great deal more information about what “management information” this refers to and how it is compiled, I’d take it with a large pinch of salt.

“Data matching” is described as “comparisons between related datasets” and I’m making that “whoosh” gesture with your hand over your head, to indicate that’s where this feels like it gets me.  Maybe it’ll become clearer further into the document?  Watch this space!

Finally there’s the category of “illustrative”, which is described as “where limited data is available, estimates are produced using assumptions made in collaboration with HMRC’s operational experts.”

Now, is it just me, or is that a polite way of saying that sometimes, where we don’t know, we just have to make a good guess?

Clearly calculation of tax gaps is going to be an…” interesting” topic: I plan to come back to it next week.

In the meantime, I’ll be at the launch of the Women in Tax network on Monday, “What do we mean by a fair tax system” and looking forward to it enormously!  If you’re there, come say hello.

Posted in Big data | Leave a Comment »

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Tax credits, grandfathering, and Budget speeches

October 19, 2015

I have very little knowledge of the tax credit system but, like many other people, I was disturbed by the suggestion that the government was taking money from the working poor and claiming it would be replaced by the increase in the national minimum wage.  For one thing, the NMW is only £6.70 an hour, applies at even lower rates to apprentices and under 20s, doesn’t apply at all to the self employed, and is poorly enforced and… creatively interpreted, shall I say? – by rapacious employers.

The rebranding of the NMW as a National Living Wage (from April next year) seems to see the age limit rise again to 25 and the amount rise to £7.20 an hour, with the promise it will reach £9 an hour by 2020.  But how can a pay rise in 2020 compensate for a tax credit cut in 2015?

— Wendy Bradley (@wendybradley) October 8, 2015

However as the row about tax credits has been in the news I have been trying to clarify my own thinking about the subject.  Because I think that tax credits should – ultimately – wither on the vine, because I think that they can be a form of corporate welfare, allowing bad employers to pay poverty wages and let the taxpayer pick up the bill.  So I believe that increasing the minimum wage and decreasing tax credits is the right thing to do, and have said so before.

I was all set, in fact, to write a blog entry suggesting that grandfathering might be the “tweak” that politicians were looking for to get themselves out of the political row.  “Grandfathering” being the term used in tax and elsewhere for changing the law but allowing the old law to continue to apply in certain circumstances – for example, reducing the maximum amount you can put into a pension, but allowing people who have already put in more than that to “grandfather” the amount already there.

So – I thought, innocently – if you changed amount of tax credit but grandfathered those already in receipt of tax credits…

Say someone had 100 of wages and 50 of tax credits, you’d grandfather that total figure, so if tax credits went down to 25 you would pay a new claimant 25 but grandfather those already on 50.  But if their wages went up to 125 you would reduce the tax credits to 25, so they would still be on the grandfathered amount – they wouldn’t be a cash loser – but the state’s contribution to the amount would reduce.  And you would hope, of course, that by the end of the parliament they would be getting wages of 200+ and tax credits of zero so the benefits of the supposed economic improvements washed out the need for tax credits and people actually were better off.

Except…

Well, except when I started looking at what George Osborne had actually said in the Budget speech, I found he said this:

This approach means no family sees a cash loss.

Either he was being disingenuous in the Budget speech (it’s written in that dreadful, flat, verb-free politician-speak, so it’s entirely possible that the clear statement I picked out refers only to one, or some, or a few of the multiple changes he’s listing), or he’s changed his mind, or he’s lied to Parliament.

I’m sure there’s a simple explanation, but I’d like to hear someone ask him the question, please.

 

Posted in Bit of politics, Budget, Tax Justice | Leave a Comment »

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Tax havens

October 16, 2015

I read this article in the Observer last week and immediately thought “yes!  This!” and tweeted the link:

Essentially, if I understand him correctly, Zucman argues that we should measure the profits of international companies in the same way that the US measures the profits of American companies trading in more than one of its states, by allocating profits in proportion to the customers of each state rather than by the location of the seller.

But, just as I thought “yes!  This!” to Piketty when I started reading Capital this summer, I nevertheless don’t think Piketty’s taxes on wealth are any more likely than Zucman’s taxes on companies, because neither of them addresses how tax law is made.

It may, indeed, be obvious to you and I that taxing the rich on what we used to call their unearned income (and isn’t THAT a term we ought to bring back into use?) and taxing companies on the proportion of their profits commensurate with the customer base that is located in the country doing the taxing, rather than in the tax haven where they have planted their brass plate, are reasonable and equitable.  But, frankly, you and I don’t make tax law.

As you may remember, I have been groping towards this question in this blog for some time, characterising a difference between tax wizards and tax muggles.  I’m now groping towards putting some academic language around this thinking, of which more, I hope, later.

But let’s look at a practical example.

The other recurring theme here is the VATMOSS VATMESS.  You’d almost think, wouldn’t you, that I agreed with the principle that VAT ought to be charged according to the location of the customer and not the seller, because is that not the very essence of the scheme Zucman proposes for international company taxation?

Well, yes: in the same way as the old joke about the country deciding to switch from driving on the left to driving on the right, and deciding to phase it in by making the switch only applicable to lorry drivers.

In other words, we have a principle that might be a better way of organising international taxation being applied piecemeal to a tiny corner of international trade.  A tiny corner least able to understand, apply and implement the change; and a tiny corner least able to contribute to the making of the regulations which burden it, because it consists of stakeholders not given an equitable voice in the stakeholder community.

I’m thinking aloud here, or, at least, groping towards an argument.  Feel free to join in, cheerlead or otherwise contribute in the comments.

Posted in Bit of politics, Equality, Tax Justice | Leave a Comment »

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Culture

October 8, 2015

It’s odd, isn’t it, that when you search on the gov.uk consultations page for open consultations in the area of “arts and culture” the website returns no results.  If instead you set the search fields to “all” and the filter to “BBC” you will find that there is indeed one open consultation.  Personally I would put a consultation by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport on the future of the BBC firmly into the “arts and culture” bracket, but let’s not draw our conclusions too early.

The consultation closes today, 8th October at 11.45pm.  I urge you to respond if you can: there is an electronic form here or you can send an email to BBCCharterReviewConsultation@culture.gov.uk.

The consultation document comes, curiously, in a choice of portrait or landscape formats, and, for once, in English or Welsh without the requirement for the Welsh-speaker to ask separately.

The front cover of the document also suggests a hashtag, #yourBBC, which on my twitter feed opens with a “promoted tweet” (an advert) for, ironically, Amazon Instant Video.  The hashtag itself seems to contain a lot of tweets urging people to respond to the BBC Trust’s own consultation which apparently closed in September, and a number of comments regarding the “confusing, misleading” questions in the current consultation.  I have also had emails from the campaigning organisation 38 Degrees urging me to complete the consultation and offering a version of the form which contains 38 Degrees’ annotations explaining the questions and suggesting the kind of areas you might want to stress in your answers.  The annotated survey is available here: on the one hand I think it’s useful to have large numbers of people responding so that the government understands that the BBC really is “our BBC” but on the other I think there is a danger that large numbers of responses channelled through one campaign website may be ignored.

So let’s have a look at the actual condoc and see what’s proposed, shall we?

There are 158 pages (did they really expect many people to read it?) and there are four themes:

  • “Mission, purpose and values” (or, why have a BBC at all)
  • “Scale and scope” (or, what should the BBC actually do)
  • “Funding” (or, how are we going to pay for it) and
  • “Governance” (or, who is in charge)

I’m very much a Reithian as far as the BBC is concerned.  The BBC’s purpose is to inform, educate and entertain. As to scale and scope, I believe you should be able to sit and watch BBC1 and see some of everything: the exact opposite of the self-curated internet bubbles we all seem to live in where it is quite possible to see only things with which you are already familiar and discuss them with people with whom you already agree.  Funding: the licence fee works, although it should perhaps be modernised to reflect the wired world we live in.  Make it payable at a reduced rate by household, but with the reduction paid for by a small levy on the sale of new phones, tablets and computers, and make non-payment a civil and not criminal offence.  Governance?  I’m less fussed about how the board is constructed than by who is on it.  Personally I’d love to be on the Board (I’m not completely a fantasist: I have been a tv critic in my time and did some work for the Fawcett Society and NAWO on the Broadcasting Act before last) but can’t see it ever happening.  I would like to see the Board made up of representatives of actual viewers as well as of the so-called Great And Good.

So now you know my opinions, how did I get on with the consultation itself.

I completed the online survey (not via 38 Degrees website)

There are nineteen questions across the four themes where the annotated 38 Degrees version has only eight.  I found the annotated version useful to give a steer as to the leading nature of the questions and if you’re short of time I’d suggest answering via their website is better than nothing.  Here are the 19 questions and my answers in full.

1. How can the BBC’s public purposes be improved so there is more clarity about what the BBC should achieve?

I don’t agree there’s a lack of clarity at present. The BBC should inform, educate and entertain.

2. Which elements of universality are most important for the BBC?

This is a poorly-expressed question! The BBC should provide a service where, if any British citizen were to have access ONLY to the BBC’s output, they could take an informed part in civil society and in the conversations of their neighbours. This includes the provision of excellent subtitling and audio description services for those with hearing and sight problems.

3. Should Charter Review formally establish a set of values for the BBC?

No. The BBC already has a set of values embodied in its history of informing, educating and entertaining the nation.

4. Is the expansion of the BBC’s services justified in the context of increased choice for audiences? Is the BBC crowding out commercial competition and, if so, is this justified?

Yes! As to “crowding out”, the glory of the British broadcasting ecology is that there is competition, not just between commercial companies with the same profit-seeking motive, but between differently funded organisations. So if the commercial broadcasters feel “crowded out” by the BBC, then good! Let them compete by doing better, not by whining about the competition.

5. Where does the evidence suggest the BBC has a positive or negative wider impact on the market?

In the programmes! In the history of different funding models in different countries, where the UK model is widely seen as excelling.

6. What role should the BBC have in preparing for the future technological landscape including in future radio switchover?

Commercial providers tend to drop a new technology onto the market and let consumers sink or swim in operating it. The BBC has a history of informing and educating (the BBC micro, for example) which should continue. They shouldn’t have to bear the costs of the commercial broadcasters, though!

7. How well is the BBC serving its national and international audiences?

Brilliantly (except its subtitling, which could do with some serious thought)

8. Does the BBC have the right genre mix across its services?

Yes.

9. Is the BBC’s content sufficiently high quality and distinctive from that of other broadcasters? What reforms could improve it?

It is sufficiently high quality. Why does its content have to be “distinctive” from other broadcasters? It isn’t broken – don’t try to fix it. Politicians should keep their hands off.

10. How should the system of content production be improved through reform of quotas or more radical options?

Talk about your leading question! The BBC should – and does – have a mix of London and non-London production, of English, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish production, and of independents and in-house production. Again, leave it alone please.

11. How should we pay for the BBC and how should the licence fee be modernised?

Again, what a leading question! Yes, we should pay for the BBC via the licence fee. Yes, it should be modernised by making it a civil rather than criminal offence not to pay, and there should be a reorganisation so that it is levied by household, not television, with a slightly lower licence per household supplemented by a small levy added to the cost of a new phone, tablet or computer.

12. Should the level of funding for certain services or programmes be protected? Should some funding be made available to other providers to deliver public service content?

Absolutely not! Politicians should agree the funding settlement for the BBC and then leave it alone. And under no circumstances should licence fee money go to “other providers”.

13. Has the BBC been doing enough to deliver value for money? How could it go further?

Yes. Leave it alone.

14. How should the BBC’s commercial operations, including BBC Worldwide, be reformed?

Another appallingly leading question! They should not. They aren’t broken. They don’t need “reform”, you are just getting pressure from commercial rivals which you should resist.

15. How should the current model of governance and regulation for the BBC be reformed?

It is not clear to me that it should! Government should keep its hands off, and there should be more civil society representation on the Board perhaps but otherwise I can’t see a need for change, just an opportunity to meddle, which it would be better to resist.

16. How should Public Value Tests and Service Licences be reformed and who should have the responsibility for making these decisions?

You have not demonstrated a need for reform. The BBC is working well: leave it alone.

17. How could the BBC improve engagement with licence fee payers and the industry through research, transparency and complaints handling?

Does it need to “improve”? Its engagement is already high.

18. How should the relationship between Parliament, Government, Ofcom, the National Audit Office and the BBC work? What accountability structures and expectations, including financial transparency and spending controls should apply?

The BBC is not a government department. Parliament and Government set the terms of the Royal Charter and the licence fee and after that should leave the BBC alone. NAO might usefully ensure no corruption or maladministration creeps into the BBC’s systems and Ofcom should work with the BBC Trust. But I shudder at the thought of government “spending controls” on the BBC.

19. Should the existing approach of a 10-year Royal Charter and Framework Agreement continue?

Yes; except in future it should begin from the viewpoint that, if the BBC is working satisfactorily, government should leave it alone. In other words the ten year review should begin from a presumption that things will stay the same and that a strong evidence base is required before any changes are made.

Posted in Bit of politics, Consultation | 1 Comment »

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The VATMOSS Threshold Paradox, Reasons Why Countries Are Wary & Why We Need Action NOW

September 17, 2015

If we’re to find a way forward to save the European digital economy – and every passing month sees yet more damage done – EU countries need to realise they can actually profit by taking small businesses out of cross-border digital VAT. On the other hand, it’s equally important to realise why different nations may be reluctant to agree to a VATMOSS threshold, despite the arguments in its favour.

Granted, at first glance, the idea that giving any businesses an exemption from tax would make any nation’s Treasury better off doesn’t seem to make much sense. Especially when countries worldwide are seeing their economies suffer from tax-base erosion and profit shifting. Which is what happens when global corporations from Amazon to Starbucks set up subsidiaries in tax havens with minimal taxation, and shuffle the paperwork to ensure they can do business worth millions of pounds/euro in the UK, France, Germany or elsewhere and only pay a fraction of the tax that would be due if those businesses were actually based in that country. These are legitimate concerns for governments and the new EU digital VAT regulations are intended as a first step to frustrate such financial fancy footwork.

But effective taxation is all a question of scale and this applies most particularly when dealing with the smallest businesses. There’s a crucial point where the fixed costs of collecting a tax are more than the money that comes in. This is a central concern with VATMOSS, given so many small-scale direct digital traders are making quarterly returns of under £/€20.

After six months of these new regulations, HMRC has revealed that 78% of the VATMOSS returns being processed in the UK only bring in 1% of the total revenue they get from this scheme. And that’s not even counting all those people submitting zero returns because they don’t happen to have made a cross-border sale in that quarter.

Is that 1% of revenue covering the cost of all that added administration? If not, then taking those smallest traders out of this system will mean the Treasury’s better off overall. It’s basic cost-versus-benefit analysis which every EU state now needs to do as a matter of urgency. They have the data. They need to use it NOW.

More than that, countries need to consider is this 1% or so worth having in the short term, compared to the losses of tax revenues that they will see in the medium and longer term?

Because there’s a tipping point for small businesses when considering the tax to be paid and the costs of paying that tax in administration and accountancy fees. There’s a point where those costs use up such a high percentage of a business’s turnover that it simply makes no sense for an individual to carry on trading for what little income is left.

If giving up their fledgling enterprise means going onto unemployment and other benefits, then that person’s government will see their social security bill go up. That country would be better off forgoing a comparatively trivial amount of tax in return for this saving on welfare.

Longer term, these small businesses which are currently being killed off with every passing month can never grow into the medium and larger companies which would have paid worthwhile amounts of tax as well as generating employment and overall economic growth.

When a small business’s income is subject to a particular tax from the very first penny, the loss of potential is even greater. The expense of compliance added to other start-up costs has now created such a forbidding barrier to entry that promising enterprises are being abandoned at the planning stage. Companies which could have become world leaders will never see the light of day.

This is especially true in the digital economy where multinational corporations have quite literally started at kitchen tables (Dunnhumby) or in garages (Apple). In the 21st century, online enterprise means investing time to start a business instead of a whole load of money up front. A single entrepreneur can turn a good idea into a digital product and take it to a global marketplace using freely available computer resources to learn new skills and the marketing reach of blogs, social media and online interest groups. As soon as a trickle of money comes in, services like web hosting and domain registration are easily affordable. As the business grows, more aspects can be contracted out, all generating economic growth and employment. All of that activity increases a country’s tax base.

But not if that business never starts up because of VATMOSS compliance costs. We already know that enterprises expecting to pay under £/€100 annually in cross-border digital VAT are facing anything from £500 to £5000 in added costs. No wonder so many people are giving up on the very idea of starting a new digital business now that they have to find that sort of money up front, before they’ve even earned a penny.

You don’t need to just take our word on all this. The OECD Secretary General has just issued a key report to the G20 Finance Ministries on taxation including VAT issues for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). You can read the whole thing here if you’re keen but these are some key points:

“… Tax compliance costs typically have a significant fixed cost component, tending to impose a relatively higher burden on SMEs than on larger enterprises which can benefit from returns to scale in complying. Tax compliance costs may affect a number of economic margins faced by the owners and operators of SMEs, notably, whether to become self-employed, whether to employ others and whether to operate in the formal economy.” (page 105 para 207)

“Along with other taxes, VAT imposes compliance costs on businesses and administrative costs on tax authorities. Although VAT is designed to be neutral for business taxpayers, VAT is often classified as particularly difficult and burdensome for SMEs to collect and comply with. Hence simplified VAT regimes for SMEs are often an efficient way to promote compliance.” (page 118, para 262)

“Exemption thresholds set a level of turnover below which there is no obligation to comply with VAT regulations. Entities under these thresholds do not account for output VAT and consequently are not entitled to deduct input tax incurred on purchases of goods and services. This is a commonly-used and straightforward option to address VAT compliance costs.” (page 118, para 264)

So why is there any debate? Why wasn’t a threshold included from the start, when the VATMOSS system was agreed?

Well, as with so much in life, it’s more complicated than that. The OECD hasn’t produced a 160 page report analysing taxation issues in detail for the fun of it. As this document also says:

“Whether to establish a threshold is an important issue for VAT design. The level of the threshold is often a trade-off between minimising compliance and administration costs and the need to avoid jeopardising revenue and/or distorting competition. Exempting small firms from the VAT system may forgo little revenue, however, the balance between cost savings and revenue losses shifts as thresholds increase and at some point the forgone revenue will exceed the compliance and administrative costs. At some intermediate point an optimal VAT threshold can be identified, at which the cost savings and revenue losses are equal. Further, there are a number of other factors including distortionary effects inherent in the application of thresholds that should be taken into account. All these considerations make the identification of the optimal threshold for each country a difficult question to determine and one which may vary across the heterogeneous SME population.” (page 119 para 271)

If identifying an optimal VAT threshold for an individual country is difficult, how much more challenging is that going to be for the entire European Union?

The 28 member states vary hugely in geographic size, location, resources and population, just to begin with. Every country’s economy has different strengths and weaknesses. Every nation sets its own priorities with regard to regulation or liberalisation of market forces and in terms of the social contract between government and citizens. Each exchequer and finance ministry sets its own budget accordingly, balancing direct taxation on income and indirect taxes like VAT, and accountable to the electorate giving its politicians their democratic mandate.

So it’s hardly surprising to see different countries oppose sweeping proposals for some one-size-fits-all, universal VAT threshold applied to all small companies’ total turnover.

This is why the EU VAT Action Campaign’s call for a VATMOSS threshold specifically states that this should only apply to cross-border digital sales. Every country’s own domestic VAT regime would still apply outside that, leaving national sovereignty over taxation unchallenged.

Working out the fine details will be a complex task and such things invariably take time. Unfortunately we have no time to spare, now that these regulations are already in operation.

The damage is already being done as businesses close, scale back their digital sales or lose income vital to their future growth in 3rd party marketplace fees. All of which erodes every EU country’s tax base and potentially adds to its welfare bill.

This is why the EU VAT Action Campaign is calling for immediate interim easements to save the small businesses worst affected from going under in the two to five years it will take before these laws can be changed at EU level.

Whether these interim thresholds or suspension come centrally from the EU Commission or individually from national governments using their discretion to protect their own economies as they see best is a secondary consideration. The primary issue is practical action to save the digital, knowledge and skills-based economy needs to happen NOW.

(reblogged from euvataction.org by kind invitation, which is very much appreciated, Juliet E McKenna)

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State of play

September 16, 2015

So there are fourteen open consultations listed as relating to HMRC on the gov.uk website today.  If you filter instead for the “tax and revenue” policy area (all departments) the total comes up as 18 – four from the Treasury.  Query: why are some tax consultations badged from the Treasury and some from HMRC?  Answers on a postcard…

The first is a review of travel and subsistence rules.  It was published under the coalition government, in July 2014, but says that it closes at quarter to midnight on 1st May 2016.  I find this rather improbable, and I wish gov.uk would have a look at it.

You have until 30th September to respond on the taxation of performance linked rewards paid to asset managers, employment intermediaries and tax relief for travel and subsistence, ISA qualifying investments and crowd funding, and the IR35 discussion document

You need to get motoring to respond to the implementation of the Personal Savings Allowance and the deduction of income tax from interest in peer to peer lending which both close on 18th September.  The other handful all have closing dates in October.

But I could have read and perhaps responded to one of them in the time I’ve taken today trying to identify which one to prioritise.  Because apparently listing consultations with a visible closure date and/or in the order in which they close remains beyond the wit of a twenty first century government.  Or, as I said on Facebook yesterday, you’d almost imagine they didn’t want responses from Jo Public.

 

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

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Citizens and tax justice

September 15, 2015

How are citizens to engage with tax policy?  One method, the one which led to the foundation of this blog, is to seek out and respond to tax consultations.  In theory, any citizen can find, read, consider and respond to the government’s proposals for the tax system via the list of consultations published on the gov.uk website.

In practice…?

Well, a few weeks ago I saw a couple of tweets about a proposal to charge fees for taxpayers to challenge HMRC decisions at tax tribunals.  It started here:

and more detail came from this:

Because here it is: the actual consultation document is on the Ministry of Justice site under the splendid title of “Enhanced fees for divorce, possession claims and general applications in civil proceedings and consultation on further fees proposal”

Now, I don’t know about you, but to me this does not immediately say “there’s a section about tax tribunals!  You need to read this, honest!”  It does not come up if you filter the “open consultations” section of the “consultations” page on gov.uk by the “tax and revenue” policy area, for example.  How were we to know it was there?

Having found the page (from the links provided on twitter) I was rather taken aback to see it described, in the overview, as “the government response to the consultation on enhanced fees for possession claims…” and it took me a while to work out that it was the final paragraph that must refer to the tax tribunal proposals (“In addition, we have today published a further consultation on a number of new fees proposals. This consultation proposes new or increased fees in a range of court and tribunal proceedings and the detailed proposals can be found in chapters 3 and 4 of the document provided below.”

The “document provided below”??  There are some documents “below”, three listed under the heading of “previous consultations” and seven under “related documents”.  It is not at all obvious which document contains the new proposals.  Where, then, are we to look for details of the proposals on tax tribunals?

Well, I’m an Impact Assessment wonk, so I started with the final document, the Impact Assessment for the “introduction of fees” to (amongst others) the “First Tier Tax Chamber, Upper Tier Tax Chamber” (IA No: MOJ008/2015)

What do we learn from this?  Well, first of all the perceived problem seems to be that the tribunals don’t cover their own costs and that government action is required to “reduce the burden on the taxpayer”.  Now to me this is begging rather a number of questions.  When, firstly, did we require courts to cover their own costs?  Isn’t the cost of justice precisely one of the reasons for having a tax system in the first place?  Isn’t it part of the deal we make in living in a functioning state, that the state will collect money from us in taxes but in return will provide us with security including a system of justice?  In other words, I reject the basic premise of the IA: this is not a problem that requires government action.  Collecting fees from applicants for justice is not justice: it is commerce.  It is the Ritz Hotel model of equality, where we all equally have the right to dine at the Ritz but only those with sufficient cash in hand are able to exercise that right.

Next, “what policy options have been considered, including any alternatives to regulation? Please justify any preferred option.”  Now this looked promising, at least in the sense that there are five options listed.  They are, however, different strands of the SAME proposal: there is a “do nothing” option, option zero, and then there are five separate options listed, the second of which is the tax chamber proposal.  These are not alternative options, they are different elements of the same proposal, the proposal to impose fees.  There is no suggestion that the perceived “need” to make the tax tribunal cover its own costs might be met in several different ways.  Off the top of my head, you could meet the court costs by a grant from HMRC, by a charge to anyone losing a case where tax at stake was more than £x million, by a percentage levy on the losing side in proportion to the tax at stake or by, I don’t know, starting a court tv service, televising the tribunals and selling bloody advertising. My point is, those are four different alternative options.  “Do this or don’t do it” isn’t presenting options at all: it’s a statement of intent.  Particularly when you say, as the government does in the impact assessment (under “Will the policy be reviewed?”) that once charges have been introduced the decision “will not be reviewed”  Why the hell not???

Turning to the “evidence” base, the scant material has been repeated five times so it looks as if someone has given it consideration, but a cursory glance at the actual material suggests otherwise.  Look at the bottom of page 15 where the evidence base for the tax tribunal proposals begins.  It reads:

45.  When cases are first issued in the First Tier Tribunal, they are assigned a case category (Paper, Basic, Standard or Complex) by the tribunal.  This is

However if you turn to page 16 hoping to find the end of that sentence, you will see instead what appears to be a misallocated footnote numbered 11 and then section 46.

This is a miserable, shoddy excuse for an impact assessment for what seems to me from reading it to be a miserable, shoddy excuse for a policy.  The consultation closes today.  There was an article about it in last week’s Taxation, so I expect at least some tax practitioners will have been alerted to what is proposed.  But, honestly, how would it serve justice if someone wanting to challenge the imposition of a fixed penalty of £100 for a late return were to be required to pay £50 for the privilege of challenging the state’s view of the case?  Follow this link to the electronic form…. Oh.  Actually the bloody thing closed at noon today.  No, it doesn’t tell you that on the consultation website.  But it does on the gov.uk landing page.

Posted in Bit of politics, Consultation, Equality | 3 Comments »

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Three more things

September 9, 2015

Three more thoughts, at a little more leisure, after Sunday night’s call to arms on the government’s consultation on the gender wage gap (see previous entry).

Firstly, how is it that gov.uk still doesn’t produce the list of open consultations in a usable format?  Seriously, look at the list here which shows you all consultations which are currently open.  At the time of writing there are 119 and, if you scroll down the list, you’ll see that they are in fact in date order.  But they are in order of the date on which they were published.  To find out when any of the consultations close, you have to click on the link to the specific consultation, open up the new page, and look for the closure date.  In the great scheme of things that might not seem like much, but it means that you can’t extract a list of open consultations, order them by date of closure, and then concentrate your efforts on the ones which are closing soon to make sure you don’t miss something.  You’d almost think they didn’t want consultations responses from individual citizens…

Secondly, on the format of the consultation, what on earth was the thing with the electronic form all about?  Why do you have to provide an email address, a snail mail address AND a contact phone number in order to respond?  Any one of three ought to be sufficient, surely?  And, while I can see it might be administratively convenient to have responses on an eform so that you can easily aggregate the responses, I can’t say that I came away from it with any sense of having contributed to a serious debate on the issues.

Third and finally, what were the issues?  In retrospect, this was a consultation on whether and how the commitment to require employers of more than 250 staff to publish their gender pay gap details was to be fulfilled.  The gender pay gap in this context is the difference between the average hourly pay of male and female employees.  So you can see that a firm with a largely female workforce in something like a caring profession, perhaps with a largely male boardroom and management cadre, might have a substantial pay gap explained by the makeup of the workforce.  You can also see how companies might be temped to game the figures by adding a few highly paid female board members to their roster, and I should mention here that I’m open to non-exec positions…  Ahem.

However the condoc tells us that the National Statistics Office uses the median hourly rate (excluding overtime and bonuses) to calculate the gap.

Why exclude overtime and bonuses?  There have been a number of high profile court cases about female high flyers in the feral professions nevertheless being denied the seven figure bonuses paid to comparable males.  Let’s add that in, surely?  And excluding overtime surely again offers chances to game the system by paying men for overtime not available to women?

The main point, though, is whether it’s more useful to have the pay gap measured by use of the average or the median rate.  Say you had 100 female employees earning £10 an hour and ten male managers on the kind of salary that averages out as £60 an hour, with three male and one female board members on an hourly equivalent of £200.  The average hourly rate for women would be ((100 x 10) + 200) / 101 = 11.88.  Most women earn £10 an hour, but the one very highly paid woman raises the average slightly.  The men average ((10×60)+(2×200))/12 = £83.  In this very crude example there are fewer men in higher paid positions and a lot of women in lower paid occupations – the wage gap is 83-11.88 = £71.12

If you use the median hourly rate, you find the one in the middle.  You rank the women in order of hourly salary and pick the middle one:

200

10

10

10…

(I’m not going to list that 100 times but you get the idea.  The middle woman, the 51st on the list, still gets £10 an hour, so that’s the median hourly rate.)

The men:

200

200

60

60

60… etc etc

Again, the middle number (the seventh man) gets £60.  The wage gap is £60-10=£50.

These two figures tell you different things.  (As well as the median and the mean, you might also want the mode, the most frequently occurring number, but in this artificial example it gives the same figure as the median)

You could, for example, envisage tweaking the figures.  If the company took on some men in its general workforce and appointed some female managers it could fairly easily arrive at a median wage gap of zero.  Appoint another female board member and you might wind up with an average wage gap of zero.  And perhaps those are the kinds of actions we might want to encourage businesses to take; I don’t know.

My point is, though, that this is what the consultation ought to have been about.  What IS the real gap between men’s and women’s pay, how best can we capture and promulgate it, in order to nudge companies to do something about it?

What a missed opportunity.

Posted in Bit of politics, Consultation, Equality | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment »

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Luck of the draw

September 6, 2015

I’m writing this rapidly, at around half nine on the evening of 6th September, because – while idly flicking through twitter – I saw a tweet from @Govt_Women (“the official feed for the UK Government Equalities Office”) reminding people there’s a consultation on the Gender Pay Gap closing in three hours.

Actually according to the consultation document here, it closes at 11.45pm tonight, so you’ve still got a couple of hours, just.

Here’s my brief summary of the condoc:

  • the gender pay gap is the gap between *average* salaries for men and *average* salaries for women
  • pay discrimination doesn’t wholly explain it (because “pay discrimination… is already unlawful” – bless!)
  • causes can include women being concentrated in lower paid occupations, women not being promoted to senior positions, and women losing seniority if they take time off for childcare

The consultation, however, is purely on how the tories achieve their manifesto commitment of requiring employers of more than 250 people to publish the figure.  It’s already in the 2010 Equality Act, but it’s a “power to introduce regulations” power.  The consultation is on what the regulations should contain.

Responses are requested on an eform which you can find here, and it’ll only take you a few minutes.  Let’s try to get a few hundred “just get ON WITH IT”s in the last hour???

 

 

Posted in Bit of politics, Consultation, Equality | 1 Comment »

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