The Institute of Fiscal Studies is the main sponsor of the Mirrlees Review, chaired by Nobel Laureate Professor Sir James Mirrlees of the University of Cambridge, with the aim of designing what they call “a tax system for the 21st century”. This has generated much detailed work, exposing the detailed impact of the tax system. There is a mass of discussion about the effects, all of them...

Articles in the transport press point to the problems caused because there is no proper system of land value taxation in place. This is disussed in relation to Crossrail, which received Royal Assent in July. Who will pay for the £16 billion scheme?

This article appeared in the Monitor section of “Public Service and Local Government” May 1983. “PAYE” is Pay As You Earn, the UK way of collecting personal income tax by making the businesses collect it at their expense from wages and salaries from their employees.   Corporate accounting British Steel lost £358m in the year 1981/82. Or did it? Everything depends on how the...

Buy-to-let property investors, who have long been elbowing first-time buyers out of the housing market, have emerged as unexpected beneficiaries of the stamp duty holiday announced this week.In an attempt to ease affordability for first-time buyers and re-energise the housing market, the government waived the 1 per cent stamp duty for properties under £175,000 for the next year. Is there no limit...

Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party has long advocated a Local Income Tax instead of the Council Tax and has now announced that it will be included in the next legislative programme. The belief is that it is based on “ability to pay”. That notion is a delusion (see below). It has been widely condemned, for example in this article which appeared in The Scotsman in September...

An article in The Independent reports that buildings are already been knocked down to avoid having to pay rates after the government abolished rates relief on vacant property. Anyone familiar with the theory behind LVT could have warned the government that this would happen, but in any case, have they forgotten how the Window Tax led to bricked-up windows? However, given that this is being done...

Following on from the comments above, a further difficulty is that the media seem increasingly unwilling to publish or discuss ideas that fall outside the conventional way of thinking about things. A couple of weeks ago, the former Conservative Chancellor Sir Geoffrey Howe talked about the need to change the way tax law is made, citing some of the recent changes which have proved so troublesome....

Yet again, the British government is in trouble with tax. The Daily Telegraph business section reported today (22 July 2008) that… “in a letter to the CBI, the Treasury apparently relented on its plans to levy new taxes on multinational companies. With two already having opted to move their headquarters away from the UK and more threatening to follow suit, the business lobby’s...

According to the Swedish taxation board, Skatteverket, there is a large gap between the amount that it believes it should be collecting and what it actually manages to gather in, amounting to 5% of the gross national product. It is referred to as the Tax Gap. As nearly everywhere else, most of the tax is levied through charges on labour, goods and services. Skatteverket states that “The tax...

There was a news piece this morning (8 July) about the problem the Swedish tax authorities are having with getting the right amount of tax out of taxi drives. Yesterday there was a report of the crack-down by Skattverket on restaurants who fiddle their takings; a popular method has been by manipulating their cash registers. So far, over 100 restaurateurs have been convicted and 45 sent to prison. Sweden...