10 years of sweet SA

I read with great interest Mark Lee's article Ten years of sweet SA as I can well remember entering into some fairly vigorous correspondence at the time that self assessment was introduced.

During that period I was a member of the old LSCA Tax Technical Committee as the representative of North London.

Mark makes the point in his excellent article that it is surprising that nobody reported HMRC to the Advertising Standards Authority but in fact this is not the case because I did just that.

In fact I claimed that the nonsense which that pathetic character Hector spouted to members of the public on television included the biggest lie ever told in the history of commercial broadcasting.

I claimed that the lie was that self assessment was being introduced to make tax easier for the public to understand and deal with whereas we...