TAXTOPIA: How I Discovered the Injustices, Scams and Guilty Secrets of the Tax Evasion Game

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Nigel Lawson, a Conservative chancellor under Margaret Thatcher, made taxes on capital gains and income equal in 1988, so that people paid a top rate of 40 per cent no matter how they had earned their money. He wants to explain how “you are paying way more in tax than you think you are”, subsidising “the wealthy” in the process.

I would very much recommend reading Taxtopia because it's the most hilarious book about tax I've ever read! It was a Labour chancellor, Gordon Brown, who made big cuts to capital gains rates 10 years later which have largely benefitted the wealthy. Very funny (and furious)…By the end of the book you may be spluttering with rage at the injustice of it all. This is because of national insurance, “the biggest stealth tax out there”, he explains – and that’s before any student-loan fees and council tax. That’s why there are around 30,000 tax advisers, and about 100,000 people working in tax altogether.Big-name and big-money disputes like this have provoked schadenfreude-fuelled headlines for years, often involving far more complicated disputes over alleged “dodges”. I’d always accepted that the tax system in big western democracies was stupidly over-complicated, and that the law allowed people to weave through those laws to arrive at their most beneficial outcome…. Now, that’s people being done by at the top of the profession – tax partners earning a million a year advising another multimillionaire how to pay less tax.

If you sign into Viva Engage via Microsoft 365, select View and update your profile in Office Delve to change your profile. You will be able to afford to employ an accountant, who, with their well-honed tricks, will funnel your money away from the state and back into your pocket (minus a sizeable sum for themselves). Though he insists that he has never “personally done anything illegal, or even perhaps unethical”, he knows of many others who have. Let’s be honest: this vastly simplified tax regime is almost certainly never, ever going to be introduced.The shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, says Labour would abolish the “non-dom” tax status if it wins the next general election. The book is enormously readable … I would very much recommend reading Taxtopia because it’s the most hilarious book about tax I’ve ever read! The technical stuff is often in chatty footnotes full of jokes, while the narrative lays bare the absurd and unjust complexities of a tax system designed by accountants, he says, to keep them in work.

A chartered tax adviser based in London, he has anonymously written a new book, Taxtopia, which explains precisely how the UK’s system is “rigged” in favour of the wealthiest and reveals the methods – sometimes simple, sometimes clever, often outrageous – they can use to take advantage. p>

Read about how we’ll protect and use your data in our Privacy Notices.If you suspect that tax is a rigged game, a con, designed to fleece the little guy, you are about to find out just how shockingly true that really is. Established in 2011, the Young Money Blog was the first British blog to help young people get to grips with personal finance. Meeting i at his publisher’s offices in London, it’s safe to say that he would blend in easily at any tax advisers convention.

You might say these statistics simply reflect a basic fact about the UK: there are far fewer wealthy people, yet they are dealing with far greater sums of money. They usually manage to slip away without any of us learning their names, even if all the celebrities blame them. She came to prominence as the founder of Young Money Blog, the first blog in the UK devoted to young people’s finances. While reports of celebrities avoiding taxes can be galling, it’s more alarming when politicians are caught doing it.These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. house in London from an offshore company to use it as an office for her business, the leaked Pandora Papers revealed in 2021. And this month Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor, said in his spring Budget that he aims to create “a new criminal offence for promoters of tax avoidance” and wants those involved to be disqualified as company directors faster. A shocking, enraging, sometimes hilarious expose of a tax system that lives down to all our worst fears of further enriching the wealthy at the expense of the little guys.