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This April marks the 50th anniversary of the coming into force of VAT in the UK. I was in the sixth form at school and, had I known that I was going to have a career in tax, I might have paid more attention. I vaguely remember its introduction, but I can’t really say it made a big impact on me at the time.
We will mark – celebrate? – the anniversary by devoting our 6 April edition to VAT. We have some plans in place but would appreciate your help in three areas.
The first is that we would like to produce a fairly light-hearted piece looking back over these 50 years and would enjoy reading any short anecdotes you might want to share with us about some of your more unusual and amusing experiences with VAT.
Secondly, we intend to use the Readers’ forum on 6 April to publish answers to VAT questions. We already have some questions in hand, but it would be good to receive a few more. We will publish the questions in the 16 March edition to give people time to reply. So, thinking caps on and come up with some interesting questions for us.
Finally, and this is more of a long shot, we would really be interested to hear from any reader who was in practice (or in business) in 1973 who would be prepared to share their experience of what it was like to have to deal with an entirely new tax. Tax advisers have long careers. The great Robert Maas has just retired aged over 80 (we expect to be publishing a retrospective by him in a forthcoming edition), so I am hoping that there is somebody out there to whom 1973 feels like only yesterday.
If you do one thing...
The closing date for Taxation Award entries is getting close – 10 March. Have you got your entry in yet? See www.taxationawards.co.uk for more information.
