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Tax is bound to be a key theme in the general election. Taxation magazine is, of course, strictly politically neutral and it is not for us to comment on the details of any party’s tax policies. But I think that it is appropriate to make some general comments here.
In what is bound to be the rough and tumble of debate it is all too easy for people to talk in headline terms without any thought given to how any proposed policies might actually work in practice. We can all think of tax changes in the past which, whatever the objective, have created huge implementation difficulties. One only has to reflect on the letters ‘HICBC’ to be reminded of the chaos that can be caused by a complete lack of co-ordination between policy and implementation. We must hope that lessons have been learned.
It is unrealistic to hope that matters of detail will be covered in political speeches. As somebody once said: ‘You campaign in poetry but govern in prose.’ But it is not too much, I hope, to urge that the detailed work to link policy to implementation is done behind the scenes. There are already so many stresses and strains with the tax system: the last thing we need is for new policies to create further unnecessary work for taxpayers, agents and HMRC alike.
I assume that we will have some form of budget/fiscal event, whoever wins, soon after the election. Perhaps after that we might get into a stable fiscal cycle. Over the past few years we have had so many fiscal events that I, for one, have completely lost track of what the timetable is supposed to be.
We have some very interesting weeks ahead of us.
If you do one thing...
Read HMRC’s updated standard for agents. See tinyurl.com/hmrcstandardagents.
