Sunday, January 29, 2012
Irresponsibility
During the early years of the present crisis the DT used to irritate me with its continual prophesies of doom, prophesies which I thought were adding fuel to the bonfire. Behaviour worthy of the lowest redtop.
Yesterday I was irritated by a piece by one Vicki Woods which was having a pop at HMCR for complaining about the number of middling sort of people who do not pay the tax they should.
One leg of her complaint rests on the large amount of schmoozing between senior officials of HMCR and senior officers of large companies, schmoozing which from time to time results in deals which look very cosy to the lay eye. One rule for the rich and another for the poor. Which is indeed all rather irritating, but I dare say some other columnist in the DT would get just as cross if HMCR appeared to be being aggressive in its approach to the wealth creating businesses of these green and pleasant islands.
The other leg is to poor scorn on the very idea of trying to pull up small business men - say gardeners, plumbers and roofers - over their predilection for cash payments which they do not then declare to anyone. Now she has a point that most people do not like to sneak and do like to be on good terms with their plumber; you never know when you might need him. But we are not talking peanuts. While the Treasury web site is silent on the matter - at least search for 'black economy' did not get me very far - a 2 year old article from the Independent suggests that tax avoidance is running at about 10% of the UK total, say £45 billion, and that it gets much worse as you move south down the rest of the world, roughly speaking. Of this total, some £15 billion is missing VAT from all sorts of people, £6 billion is missing income tax from small people and £6 billion is missing corporation tax from big people. It seems likely that current pressures are pushing all these figures up.
I think she is quite wrong to take this tone and would have done better to keep her mouth shut. It is quite hard enough for the government of the day, of whatever colour, to balance the books without having supposedly responsible newspapers more or less saying that it is OK to cheat. Not the attitude we need to promote: we need to move to a world where my plumber (or whatever) does not abandon ship merely because I ask for a bill so that I can pay the 20% VAT. Plumbers make good money and I do not see why they should not pay their whack along with the rest of us - any less than Microsoft. A company which I believe cycles a lot of the large profits it makes in this part of the world through the low cost Irish regime - a low cost regime which the rest of us are having to pay good money to prop up. But that is another story.
Yesterday I was irritated by a piece by one Vicki Woods which was having a pop at HMCR for complaining about the number of middling sort of people who do not pay the tax they should.
One leg of her complaint rests on the large amount of schmoozing between senior officials of HMCR and senior officers of large companies, schmoozing which from time to time results in deals which look very cosy to the lay eye. One rule for the rich and another for the poor. Which is indeed all rather irritating, but I dare say some other columnist in the DT would get just as cross if HMCR appeared to be being aggressive in its approach to the wealth creating businesses of these green and pleasant islands.
The other leg is to poor scorn on the very idea of trying to pull up small business men - say gardeners, plumbers and roofers - over their predilection for cash payments which they do not then declare to anyone. Now she has a point that most people do not like to sneak and do like to be on good terms with their plumber; you never know when you might need him. But we are not talking peanuts. While the Treasury web site is silent on the matter - at least search for 'black economy' did not get me very far - a 2 year old article from the Independent suggests that tax avoidance is running at about 10% of the UK total, say £45 billion, and that it gets much worse as you move south down the rest of the world, roughly speaking. Of this total, some £15 billion is missing VAT from all sorts of people, £6 billion is missing income tax from small people and £6 billion is missing corporation tax from big people. It seems likely that current pressures are pushing all these figures up.
I think she is quite wrong to take this tone and would have done better to keep her mouth shut. It is quite hard enough for the government of the day, of whatever colour, to balance the books without having supposedly responsible newspapers more or less saying that it is OK to cheat. Not the attitude we need to promote: we need to move to a world where my plumber (or whatever) does not abandon ship merely because I ask for a bill so that I can pay the 20% VAT. Plumbers make good money and I do not see why they should not pay their whack along with the rest of us - any less than Microsoft. A company which I believe cycles a lot of the large profits it makes in this part of the world through the low cost Irish regime - a low cost regime which the rest of us are having to pay good money to prop up. But that is another story.
# posted by Jim @ 6:24 AM 
