Breaking the silence

In a commendable move, BDO Stoy Hayward has launched a micro site, which seeks to address future tax policy in advance of the general election.  Commendable because, in an era when the largest of the accountancy (and legal) firms are busy troughing away at the public purse, the firm has taken a bi-partisan swipe at the politicos and their collective absence of backbone when refusing explicitly to address the inevitability of tax hikes on the population as a whole. 

With the professionals being well, if not best, placed to understand how the politicans' tax policies actually play out in real life, but generally tending to only go public when it suits their own narrow commercial interests, it has to be hoped that this initiative will gain some momentum and reach a wider audience than merely the usual tax nerds and policy wonks.

To this end, there is a twitter feed,, at @bdoaccountant, which requires the hashtag #breakthesilence. Presumably, twits know what that means.

Whilst no one would sensibly expect a firm with the reach of BDO to be prepared to go out on a limb in overtly crticising an incumbent government, that certainly does not mean that criticism is not due. 

So, from someone else, here's a random selection of tax policy humdingers the future equivalent of which no government, of whatever stripe, should ever be allowed to replicate:

• The 1997 raid on pension schemes which led to an already disinterested population eschewing formal pension savings, thereby exacerbating the long term retirement savings crisis, fuelling an unsustainable housing bubble, creating the buy to let phenonenom, and a world beating household debt burden to boot.

• The imposition on a tax collecting agency of a benefits distribution mandate, leading to the scandalous waste, still continuing, of billions of pounds of public money through tax credit fraud, along with the infliction of everyday administrative and financial misery on the least well-off in society.

• The risible knee jerk short term political expediency of the 2007 announcement of the remittance basis code of taxation for non-domicilliaries.  A policy which was laughably projected to increase the UK tax take by £4BN a year but which is not only now looking as though it will cost the UK that much, if not more, in lost tax revenues but which has, moreover, trashed the UK's reputation on the international stage with many businesses now even refusing to consider the UK as a location because it is no longer deemed trustworthy or dependable in its law making.   

For what it's worth, if I was an opposition politican needing to collect a shedload of cash and wanting to be in power for the next  twenty years, I would be very seriously scoping the immediate, complete and retroactive abolition of the principal private residence exemption.