Chancellor in tax dodge shocker
Osborne: shocked
George Gideon Oliver Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer heir to the baronetcy of Ballentaylor, member of the Bullingdon Club, chum to David Cameron and Nat Rothschild, Member of Parliament for Tatton, with an estimated personal fortune of £4 million (from a trust fund paid for by his father) has said, “I was shocked to see that some of the very wealthiest people in the country have organised their tax affairs… so that they were regularly paying virtually no income tax. I’m talking about people right at the top. I’m talking about people with incomes of many millions of pounds a year. The general principle is that people should pay income tax and that includes people with the highest incomes.”
The “surprise” comes after George Osborne saw a confidential study by HMRC which found that the wealthiest people are using legal avoidance tactics to reduce their income tax rate to an average of 10% – less than half the level paid by the average Briton.
Can he really be surprised? The Guardian thinks not and quotes Mr Osborne from his budget speach last month, ” under the last Government, it was the boast of some high earners that, with the help of their accountants, they were paying less in tax than their cleaners. I regard tax evasion and – indeed – aggressive tax avoidance – as morally repugnant.”
The bottom line is this: and it’s what tax-hell.co.uk is all about, there are very rich people who are being treated with kid gloves by HMRC and allowed to doge tax with relative ease, while you’ve got builders, hairdressers, plumbers and taxi drivers who earn significantly less but pay more tax, and if an investigation takes place these are the people who are – quite frankly – hammered.
People write in all the time and say that they feel HMRC has a personal vendetta against them, I write back and say, that’s normal, that’s how everybody being investigated feels.
So will HMRC now stop being so hard on Joe public and start going for the Big Boys? I don’t think so, but then I’ve been wrong before.
Guardian quote taken from here. The shocked quote comes from an interview in the Telegraph, which is here.
