A leading tax specialist has warned Jersey’s finance system needs to be more open and transparent. Richard Murphy, from Tax Research UK, says the system needs to be clearer to achieve a successful long-term future. He says the current secrecy in the system is fuelling rumours of tax avoidance. I wonder who it is spreading

Over at the ASI blog, Tim Worstall writes on tax cuts for Conservatives (and Lib Dems) who believe there is such a thing as society: The biggest problem we have in our tax system is at the lower end of it, where too many of the working poor are sucked into the tax system while they're earning almost trivial sums of money. The interaction of this and the benefits system means that millions fac...

The complexity of the tax system has increased dramatically since Gordon Brown swept away the 10p tax rate in 2007 in a drive for simplification, the Institute for Fiscal Studies says

The two issues, which I think, will come to dominate the closing weekend of the 2008 campaign: Tax and Immigration. Obama's admission that his policies would "spread the wealth around" has ignited a fierce debate in the US about of how progressive the tax system should be. Obama has been very successful in bolstering the conventional wisdom that the U.S. tax system does not place a significant

By cutting taxes for those on low and middle incomes, and taking the poorest out of tax altogether, we will finally be able to return a sense of fairness to the tax system, writes Vince Cable The fiasco over the 10p tax rate has highlighted more than ever the corrosive sense of unfairness created by Gordon Brown’s tax system; and the Tories have devoted themselves to making a virtue of having no ...

There has been a lot of a chat recently about how the Local Income Tax will prove to be a new Poll Tax. So I thought I would do a comparison: A poll tax is a tax of a uniform, fixed amount per individual (as opposed to a percentage of income). A Local Income Tax will be an extra 3% on our Income Tax, paid through PAYE. Per Wikipedia: The (poll tax) system was unpopular. It seemed to shift the tax ...

The welfare state depends on a strongly progressive tax system. It seems to me that Globalisation effectively caps the degree to which a tax system can be redistributive even if we wanted it to be. That Google UK can be established in Ireland tells us something. Their lower corporation tax saves them 100 million a year and so their shareholders are entitled to expect them to act like that. There i...

And he’s shocked I tell, shocked. He finds that the direct tax system is progressive, the indirect system highly regressive and the allocation of benefits is progressive. Gini on market incomes is somewhere over 0.5 and at the end of the money shuffling is 0.34 or so (don’t take those as being too accurate, I’m just

Tory MPs will demand action to recognise marriage in the tax system by allowing spouses to transfer their personal allowances.

Dozens of MPs, including at least two cabinet ministers, have benefited from loopholes in the tax system to save themselves tens of thousands of pounds, it emerged yesterday. MPs have routinely classed their second homes as main residences to avoid paying capital gains tax (CGT) when they are sold.