OTS scopes capital allowances review

The Office of Tax Simplification (OTS) has set out the scope of a review exploring the impact and challenges of replacing capital allowances with accounts depreciation.

This document follows up one of the main recommendations in the OTS’s review on simplifying the corporation tax computation published in July 2017.

The review will look at who might be better or worse off including ways in which such a change could be made revenue-neutral and the benefits and challenges involved. It will consider a combination of technical and administrative questions and related non-tax issues including:

• the nature of accounts depreciation and the role of judgment in its quantification;
• practices used by companies in deciding on rates of depreciation and typical rates used for different types of assets;
• the industry impact of adopting accounts depreciation;
• the...