One of the Truss Financial Event measures which has yet to be reversed is Kwasi’s abolition of the Office of Tax Simplification. That’s certainly not because it’s simple enough already, as we have one of the world’s most complex tax systems; not least because of successive governments’ ‘pledges’ not to increase the holy trinity of income tax, NI and VAT. As a result, all they can do to tinker around with what we already have, adding a knob here and a whistle there to bring in a few extra bob and hope that no-one notices. And so more and more layers of complexity are added, making the whole thing a nightmare to administer and our exams even more difficult (spare a thought!). Will anyone be brave enough to do some root and branch reform? Well, maybe someone with a big enough majority in parliament…
“Jeremy Vine latest to face HMRC in IR35 battle”
Yes, you heard it here first, there was something good in Liz Truss’s mini-budget: she abolished, or tried to abolish IR35. The ‘IR’ stands for Inland Revenue, so you can see it’s a regulation, or attempt at a regulation, which goes back to pre-HMRC days (that’s when it was merged with Customs & Excise, kids etc.).
