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Letter from office chair Jacks offers corrections
The Office of Tax Simplification (OTS) has criticised the manner in which it was treated in last week’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) paper on legal tax dodging.
The office’s tax director, John Whiting, claimed the committee, chaired by Margaret Hodge MP, failed to contact the OTS before preparing the document Tax Avoidance: the Role of Large Accountancy Firms, and consequently presented “an incorrect picture of what we had done to date”. He hoped his organisation would be given “the chance to appear before the PAC to give the correct picture”.
The commitee reported that “HM Treasury’s Office of Tax Simplification… is under-resourced and employs fewer than six full-time staff. So far, it has focused on the deletion of tax reliefs which are not used. To make headway, it needs sufficient resources to take a more radical approach to simplifying UK tax law.”
OTS chairman Michael Jack, has written to Margaret Hodge to highlight to her the range of recommendations so far published by the office, including those covering small business and IR35, disincorporation relief, tax-advantaged share schemes and pensioner taxation.
Copies were “sent directly to a number of MPs who take an interest in our work, as well as to your committee”, adds Jacks, who asks for “confirmation that these reports were actually received” by the PAC.
The letter goes on the address claims about staffing. The OTS workforce is “a maximum of six full-time equivalents” made up of “civil servants [and] as private sector secondees contributing on a part-time basis, not full-time as the report implies”.
Jack also takes issue with the view the OTS is part of the Treasury. “Strictly speaking, this is not so,” he writes.
“We are independent of HM Treasury and in effect responsible to Parliament for the way we carry out our role. We receive excellent support from both HM Treasury and HMRC in carrying out our work.”
He ends his message to Hodge by offering to “brief both you and the committee on our work and future programme of activity, to ensure you have up-to-date information upon which to base future observations about the subject of tax simplification”.
