Keep and strengthen the Office of Tax Simplification, says CIOT

If the government is serious about ‘embedding simplification’ in the UK’s tax policy-making process it should retain the Office of Tax Simplification (OTS) and consider strengthening it says the Chartered Institute of Taxation.

In a letter to the chancellor president of the CIOT Susan Ball urges him to review the decision to abolish the OTS. She says if the government is serious about tax simplification having an arm’s length body such as the OTS makes sense alongside ‘embedding it’ in the machinery of the Treasury and HMRC.

Given the challenges the Treasury and HMRC have had to deal with recently – such as Brexit and the pandemic - Ms Ball said: ‘It is surely the case that these departments have focuses more central to their work and will (understandably) never prioritise simplification without a structural source of independent challenge.’

She added that if the...