Would you tax dodge?

Natrix wrote:

Natrix wrote:

David Mitchell sums it up well here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc8epam4NyY

 

There are shades of tax dodging, I pay into a pension and avoid tax that way, but I wouldn’t use some offshore account tax dodge

but your pension may well be invested in ways that are, remember even councils stuffed lots of their spare cash in icelandic banks before the last stockmarket crash because of “better returns”. so forgive me for rolling my eyes whenever an MP is wheeled onto tv to complain about tax avosion (its a word look it up 😉 ) with their expenses, trust funds and family company share holdings, its every Englishwoman’s (and man’s), right to avoid paying tax wherever that could be achieved within the boundaries of the law.

If we dont like the outcomes of those tax laws, change or campaign to change them, dont just bleat about the outcome.

and no I dont do gift aid.

Pensions and ISAs are
Pensions and ISAs are legitimate and sound ways of government subsidising saving and future income, in order to offset against future generations being more dependent upon the state, and to encourage saving at a time when personal debt is at pretty frightening levels.

Employing someone whose business model is to understand and exploit tax loopholes is completely different, even if it is technically legal.

A massive part of the problem is that the gamekeepers become poachers and vice-versa. There’s a revolving door between consultancies and HMRC, and people who’ve worked at HMRC and know a bit about the extent of the law can generally make more money exploiting that privately – and many do.

I don’t have much to do with HMRC, but I do with the FCA (through banking) and it’s similar. There are two main problems with the situation.
1: knowledge and skills necessary to run rings round the regulators and legislators end up in private companies. Result: those skills are exploited by big money, which predictably runs rings round the regulators and legislators.

2: bit more subtle this one: it leads to a dilution of thinking. Banking staff that cut their teeth at the sharp end of deals and, sometimes, running rings round the FCA, join the FCA and dilute that culture. It used to be a bit more ‘good guys/bad guys’ – there was a bit of a feeling that we, in banking, would push boundaries on behalf of our customers and company (of course there were scrotes who went way beyond), and it was understood that the regulators would try to police it. It’s all a lot more collaborative now, with consultations and the FCA often seeming sheepish about imposing regulations, even EU edicts. Result: the overall culture is a bit more grey, when really, it needs to be more black and white.

Example: some of the credit crisis conspiracy theories about Goldman Sachs, the ‘vampire squid’ getting its tentacles into governments everywhere, that somehow it’s a plan. It isn’t –
it doesn’t need to be. So many people in the US government have worked for Goldman, and even in Europe we have Mario Draghi, Mark Carney, Petros Christodolou, Romano Prodi; in Oz, Malcolm Turnbull. That’s just one (admittedly influential) bank.

So, people that share a fairly narrow view of capitalism and the global economy end up in prominent law-making and decision-making positions throughout the world; that view becomes pervasive, which benefits Goldman etc, and the people that should be driving change can’t entirely be trusted to see that offshore tax havens are A Bad Thing. Even if the UK were to take a stand, it’s going to take a huge cultural shift to counter that view.

David Mitchell sums it up

David Mitchell sums it up well here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc8epam4NyY

There are shades of tax dodging, I pay into a pension and avoid tax that way, but I wouldn’t use some offshore account tax dodge

PRSboy wrote:

Assuming you have savings and investments, would you save via an ISA?

Not much point any more, not since the introduction of the Personal Savings Allowance… saving accounts are now paid gross interest (and you can earn £1k interest tax fee).

https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/savings/personal-savings-allowance  

You can combine the PSA with an ISA as well, but if you have that much to invest it can probably be made to work harder for you*.

Edit – footnote: * Work hard, play hard – since the money would be probably be resident on a caribbean island  

It’s all very well

It’s all very well hypothesising, do I begrudge your self employed mate racing bikes and sponsoring himself? Not really, he’s probably just a pixel in the scheme of things.. the 1%’ers will have us all obsessing about each other doing harm when it’s only really the 1%’ers who are 99% of the problem.

Capitalism at the ugly end, taking off the many for the benefit of the few. 

For balance, I’ll add that unless I was in a situation where ‘dodging some tax’ was an option I don’t think it’d be honest of me to sit on a high horse about it. I’d morally know the right thing to do, but I’d probably still run with the loophole and blame the system to justify it.  Fixing that is a ‘interpretation of the law issue’ which means you need to ‘spell all the rules out’, cross the t’s and dot the i’s… or it doesn’t count = loophole.