This week's opinion: 7 April 2022

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

I suspect that when Shakespeare wrote those words he wasn’t thinking of museum and galleries tax relief. Had he done so he might have had said ‘would smell even sweeter’. This musing is prompted by the recent HMRC report on the impact of the relief (tinyurl.com/a27e6ymr). The most interesting finding was that the name of the relief deters some otherwise eligible organisations from claiming. One person explained: ‘Straight away I wrote off the relief because we don’t do a tax return – I thought you would have to pay some corporation tax to benefit.’ Another said: ‘Lucky that the word “tax” didn’t scare me – if you weren’t an accountant and you had an email about tax it would drop to the bottom of your pile.’

The reason that it is described as tax relief is presumably so that it does not count as public expenditure. But whatever the reason there is an important point here – how things are described matters. It would be unfortunate if some smaller museums and galleries, without tax advisers, missed out simply because of a name.

This relief is very niche, and I suspect most readers will not have any practical experience of it. But there are some wider issues here about terminology, and communication being written in a way which invites the recipient to read on rather than throw something into the wastebasket. There are lessons here, not just for HMRC, but for all of us. 

Do read the report. Even if advisers do not have clients in this sector, the discussion about communication and access to information has much of interest.