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Taxation’s Readers’ forum has been running, uninterrupted, since it first appeared on 5 October 1927 in the very first edition of the magazine. Submitting a query to the forum constitutes, for lack of a better analogy, picking the proverbial readers’ brains and benefitting from their vast collective experience.
A community not a magazine
Replies can offer the querist much needed clarity on a course of action, or guard them against it (although, of course, we warn readers to seek their own professional advice before acting on any suggestions which appear in the Readers’ forum).
Replies can also be – and have actually been – the springboard to help a taxpayer successfully bring litigation against HMRC.
The article ‘Wrong answer’ (Taxation, 3 March 2022, page 8) concerns the case of Christopher Thomson (TC8337) whose claim against HMRC started as an anonymous query in the Readers’ forum. Mr Thomson asked Taxation’s editorial team to post his query in Taxation and it appeared in the issue of 19 March 2020, page 25 (tinyurl.com/timelydisposals). One of our esteemed contributors, Pete Miller, responded to the query. When the reply was printed, Mr Thomson contacted Pete who helped in preparing Mr Thomson’s case for the First-tier Tribunal hearing – his appeal was successful.
The forum allows Taxation readers to benefit from a communal knowledge which our contributors so generously share. In the words of our editor-in-chief, Andrew Hubbard: ‘I like to think of Taxation as a community rather than simply a magazine... Perhaps the best way of being part of our community is to contribute to the Readers’ forum either by asking questions or providing answers.’ (‘This week’, Taxation, 3 March 2022, page 5.)
As some readers have already spotted, we are coming up to a significant milestone. Query number 20,000 will be published in our 18 August issue – it will be a special Readers’ forum special edition – and we want to celebrate this with a competition.
We invite readers to challenge each other by sending us (taxation@lexisnexis.co.uk) the most interesting, complex, inventive or humorous query they can come up with by Friday, 22 July. We will publish the best four queries in our 18 August special issue. The best among those four queries will be chosen as the 20,000th query. We cannot offer a prize but the author of the chosen question will achieve immortality in the pages of the magazine: who could wish for anything more? The replies will be published on 1 September. Queries which do not make the top four will still be published in the normal way in the Readers’ forum section in succeeding issues of the magazine.
What’s the answer?
We equally encourage readers to put their thinking caps on and put their knowledge to the test.
That first Readers’ forum published in October 1927 included queries on the taxation of the profits from the sale of premises by a firm of estate agents; on the introduction of life assurance premiums; on the implications of letting a farming estate while retaining the sporting and fishing rights; and on the use of motor cars for professional purposes – a query which we often see in more current issues of the magazine. Replies flooded in and the chosen replies attracted half-a-guinea each – which had a value of approximately £20.50 in today’s money. Nowadays we offer contributors £40 per reply printed in the magazine, so we have certainly kept up with the times.
For those among you who are curious, we reproduce the text of these four queries in these pages (see 1927 queries). For those who are brave as well as curious, we invite you to submit new replies to one of these queries, either based on the law as it stood in 1927 or perhaps, more likely, as the question would be answered today. We will publish the replies, received by 22 July, in the special Readers’ forum edition on 18 August.
We look forward to reading our readers’ mind-boggling queries and the replies – in our experience Taxation readers always rise to the occasion.
