Pay Academy

Have you heard of the Office of Tax Simplification?  Sounds like a joke doesn’t it, at best some clever oxymoron that someone made up in order to vent their frustration at the machinations of our tax system? Not even an original joke, you might think.

As soon as I heard of it, I thought of Charles Dickens creation in Little Dorrit of the “Office of Circumlocution”. This place, created by Dickens in the middle part of the 19^th century, was a world where public information, debtors’ petitions, disputes and settlements stayed for years, unresolved and unmoving, presided over by people who were “altogether splendid, massive, overpowering and impracticable”.   It was a world where the public couldn’t approach other than via the official forms and where “upon my soul you mustn’t come into the place saying you want to know, you know”. Sound familiar?

Okay, so we move the clock forward one hundred and fifty years and find that the Office of Circumlocution has been re-invented by our new Government and called the Office of Tax Simplification without, as far as I can gather, a hint of irony.  Not even a nod in the direction of the esteemed Mr Dickens who surely, as with his ghost of the Christmas To Come, saw the writing on the wall.

So, what is the Office of Tax Simplification? Formed in July 2010, it is made up of tax experts from HM Revenue & Customs and HM Treasury as well as external secondees from the tax and legal professions. The sort of people that you could never describe as “altogether splendid, massive, overpowering and impracticable”?  No, never, of course not; these are accessible people, that live in the real world and understand the day-to-day burdens of running your own business…

And what is their purpose? The Office has been established to provide advice to the Chancellor on simplifying the UK tax system, with the objective of reducing compliance burdens on both businesses and individual taxpayers.

So, over to you; as users of this system – have you noticed a reduction in your compliance burdens? Have you found HMRC to be more accessible, more approachable (with or without the official forms)?  No? Me neither. Still, it is early days; let’s look again in another 150 years.

Post filed under Comment and tagged PAYE, Red tape, smallest businesses, SMEs, tax.