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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
You are paying much more in tax than you think you are What Everyone Needs to Know About Tax takes an entertaining and informative look at the UK tax system in all its glory to show you just how much you pay, how the money is collected and how it affects ordinary people every day. Giving context to recent controversies including the Panama Papers, tax avoidance by multinationals, Brexit and more, this book provides a straightforward explanation of tax and the policy behind it for non-specialists -- no accounting or legal knowledge is required. The system's underlying logic is illustrated through three 'golden rules' that explain many of the UK tax regime's oddities, and the discussion focuses on the way things are rather than utopian ideas about how they might be. Case studies show how the VAT on a plumber's bill all adds up; why fraudsters made a movie to throw HMRC off their scent; how a wealthy couple can pay so little tax on a six-figure income; and the way tracing the money you paid for your iPad sheds light why the EU is demanding Apple pay billions extra in tax. Ever the political battlefield, tax is too important for you to rely on media hype for information. It affects everyone, every day, and it pays for voters and taxpayers to know more. This book leaves aside technical detail and the arcana of the tax code to give you a real-world look at how tax works. * Learn about the many ways that the tax system separates us from our money * Discover how Brexit could change the way we pay taxes * Understand how changing tax policy affects people's everyday lives * See through the rhetoric surrounding controversies in the media With tax, we have to admit that there are no easy answers. No one enjoys paying them, but without them, the Government would shut down. Seeing through politicians' cant and superficial press coverage is critical for your ability to make the decisions that benefit you; What Everyone Needs to Know About Tax gives you the background and foundational knowledge you need to be a well-informed taxpayer.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
About the author
Introduction
Why you should read this book
Chapter 1: Taxes on your income and earnings
Income tax and national insurance
Taxes on high earners
Sports, prizes and betting
The poverty trap
Chapter 2: Taxes on what you spend
Value added tax
Customs and excise
Fuel duty and green taxes
Chapter 3: Taxes on what you own
Capital gains tax
Taxes on homes and property
Taxes on pensions and saving
Chapter 4: Taxes on business
Taxing business
Multinationals and international tax
Taxing what you can't touch
Taxes on financial transactions
Chapter 5: Taxes evaded, avoided and reformed
Film finance: how governments encourage planning, avoidance and evasion
Tax evasion
Tax avoidance and the general anti-abuse rule
Tax planning
Tax reform
Conclusion: the Three Golden Rules of tax
The First Golden Rule: Lots of small taxes together add up to make big tax bills
The Second Golden Rule: No matter what name is on the bill, all taxes are ultimately suffered by human beings
The Third Golden Rule: Taxes are kept as invisible as possible
Index
End User License Agreement
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Guide
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1: Taxes on your income and earnings
Figure 1.1 The taxes on a £40 Lego set for a basic rate taxpayer showing taxes coming to as much as the toy.
Chapter 2: Taxes on what you spend
Figure 2.1 How the VAT you pay the plumber finds its way to HMRC.
List of Tables
Chapter 3: Taxes on what you own
Table 3.1 Comparing the taxes paid on wages and savings
What Everyone Needs to Know about Tax
An Introduction to the UK Tax System
James Hannam
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
ISBN 9781119375784 (pbk) ISBN 9781119375807 (ePDF)
ISBN 9781119375814 (ePub) ISBN 9781119375821 (obk)
Cover Design: Wiley
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About the author
James Hannam is a graduate of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. He has worked as a tax advisor for 20 years at several City of London institutions including KPMG, Barclays Bank and Freshfields. For the last eight years he has been with EY. He lives in Kent with his wife and two children.
By the same author:
God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science
Introduction
Why you should read this book
You pay a lot of tax. Of course, you know that. But I bet you don't know just how much you pay or all the ways the government has to extract the cash from you. I think that's something you really need to know. It will make you into a better-informed voter who can see through the cant of politicians and the distortions in the media. I'm not asking whether we should pay more or less tax. I am saying that, even before we can answer that question, we have to understand about the tax we pay already.
By the end of this book, I hope you'll also see why with tax, as with so much in life, there are no straightforward solutions. We can't raise huge amounts of money just by taxing high earners and multinational companies, or by closing loopholes and chasing tax evaders. Were it that simple, the government would already be doing it. So, if we want the NHS, state education, a half-decent army and a welfare state, we just have to cough up. No one else is going to do it for us.
Before we start, an important word of warning: this book is not intended to help you pay less tax. A common version of the UK tax code, containing the law and various pieces of official guidance, is about 24,000 pages long. On top of that, there are at least 82 volumes of court decisions going back to 1875 and reams of material from the UK's tax authority, HM Revenue & Customs (usually abbreviated to HMRC). This book only has about 160 pages and the print is rather larger than in the standard edition of the legislation. That means you should not, under any circumstances, take action in respect of your tax affairs on the strength of what you read in these pages. No really, don't. It would be like attempting cosmetic surgery with only the expertise that you have gleaned from reading The Silence of the Lambs. Whether you are running a large company or living off a modest pension, you owe it to yourself to get some decent tax advice before risking any money. Even when I make some apparently definitive statement in these pages on, for example, ISAs or the VAT treatment of Jaffa Cakes, please don't take it at face value. The UK tax system is so unfeasibly complex, so Byzantine in its intricacy and changes so quickly, that even the simplest rules can have a dozen exceptions. In short, the purpose of this book is to help you become a more knowledgeable taxpayer and voter, not to save you money.
Income taxes
Let's look at some of the taxes you pay. If you are a worker, your employer will have been deducting tax and national insurance contributions from your pay packet each month and paying it directly over to the government. There's more: your employer also has to pay national insurance contributions on top of that. That's in addition to the national insurance that you pay. For a worker on an average wage of £26,500 a year, all those taxes comes to almost £8,000 a year: an effective tax rate on earnings of 30%. You probably know the basic rate of income tax is 20%, so you might be surprised to hear the effective tax rate for an average voter is rather higher than that, even taking into account the tax-free annual allowance. Of course, this is for workers on £26,500. If you are lucky enough to earn more, your effective tax rate will be even higher.
The cunning thing is the way the government collects all this tax. You earn the money, but the government diverts its share into the Treasury's coffers before you ever get your hands on a penny. The system of Pay As You Earn (usually abbreviated to PAYE) means you can be taxed without ever feeling it. It's a pernicious regime because it means you don't appreciate just how much you are paying. Imagine if you had to write a cheque to HM Revenue & Customs every month for hundreds of pounds. At the very least, you'd be demanding better value for money from public spending.
Since the largest element of taxation is on earnings and income, that's what we'll look at in Chapter 1 of this book. We'll be asking whether high earners contribute their fair share and see how tax traps the low paid in poverty.
Taxes on spending
Tax doesn't stop there, of course. Once you have what is left of your salary in the bank, you might want to spend it. Most purchases attract Value Added Tax, or VAT.
Let's combine several taxes into an everyday situation. Your young son has set his heart on a Lego truck for his birthday. There is a big articulated lorry available, guaranteed to flutter the heart of any small boy. The local toyshop would be delighted to sell this Lego set to you for £40, but it's obliged to add 20% VAT. Unfortunately, you've already had to pay income tax and national insurance on the money you need to pay the shopkeeper. As an average earner, to have the money in your pocket to buy the truck, you need to earn a grand total of £60 before any taxes. That's half again more than the basic cost of the Lego and it doesn't even include employers' national insurance.
You can see what's happening here. Lots of different taxes – income tax, employers' and employees' national insurance contributions and VAT – accumulate without the government ever having to admit what the total amount of pain is going to come to. Keeping the tax system complicated suits the government and, if I'm honest, it suits tax accountants like me as well. That's not because accountants are all helping their clients avoid taxes, it is just that calculating what you owe is so difficult that even the smallest of businesses need professional help to get it right.
VAT is an example of a tax that the government tries to keep invisible. When we look at a price tag, it already includes the VAT. The way taxes are collected through PAYE and the VAT system makes sure that, as an individual earner, you rarely have to hand over any money yourself. It is all done for you by your employer and businesses. The happy result (for the Treasury, at least) is that none of us have the foggiest how much tax we actually pay. That means, to some extent, all taxes are ‘stealth taxes’.
There are no taxes quite so stealthy as the so-called green taxes pushing up our heating bills. Nonetheless, increase any tax enough and people start to notice. You may remember the fuel protests back in 2000. These were sparked off by increases of the duty on petrol and diesel.
Chapter 2 of this book is all about VAT, excise duties and green taxes: the taxes you pay on spending. We'll also see how tax gets in the way of free and fair trade, especially if you are a Third World farmer trying to sell your produce into the European Union.
And yet more taxes
As well as raising money, the government likes to use the tax system to encourage what it sees as virtuous behaviour. For example, it wants to promote thrift and provides incentives for us to save. We'll look at ISAs, pensions and other tax-efficient ways of locking your money away in Chapter 3. However, all these encouragements for us to save mean that the idle rich, who already have plenty of money in the bank, can get away with paying very low taxes indeed. They don't even need to resort to complicated avoidance schemes or to become a tax exile.
Capital gains tax applies on profits you make from investing in shares and other assets. Admittedly, you don't have to pay capital gains tax on your main residence when you sell it. But you do have to pay stamp duty when you buy your house, not to mention inheritance tax when you die in it. There is also council tax while you are living there, whether you own your home or not. We'll look at all these taxes on property in Chapter 3 as well.
Taxes on businesses
Company taxation has become a vexatious question. Are multinational companies like Google and Starbucks paying their fair shares? It sometimes seems that if the government went after them, the rest of us would have to pay a lot less.
It's true that some multinationals pay little tax in the UK, and the rules have recently been tightened up to deal with this. Remember, though: Google and Starbucks are American corporations so they should pay most of their tax in the USA. In any case, if we tax companies more, that doesn't let ordinary people off the hook. They still end up paying because company taxes are stealth taxes too. Companies all have customers, employees and shareholders. If you have a pension, life insurance policy or an ISA, you probably own shares in some big companies. Any tax on business has to be passed on to real people, so taxing companies is just another way of taxing you, but several levels removed so you are largely unaware of it. In Chapter 4, I'll clear up some of the common misconceptions about corporation tax and explain why many economists now realise that business taxes should be kept as low as possible.
That said, the international tax system is way behind the times. In the modern globalised economy of e-commerce and the internet, ideas (called ‘intellectual property’ in the jargon) are the most valuable things around. But because they are so mobile, taxing ideas is hard work. In Chapter 4, we'll also look at how governments have offered tax breaks for intellectual property to stay put, and how multinationals can move it around the world to keep their tax bills down. Luckily, in the last couple of years, there has been an international effort, initiated by the British government, to ensure that multinationals pay the right amount of tax.
Avoiding taxes
With all these taxes around, it is hardly surprising that some people try so hard to avoid paying them. But this is not often a good idea. The taxman is likely to take you to court if he thinks you are playing the system. And the courts are not sympathetic towards tax avoiders. At least tax avoidance is only likely to cost you money. Tax evaders can end up in prison. By the way, evasion and avoidance are very different beasts. If you evade taxes, you are using fraud to pull the wool over the taxman's eyes. It's illegal and you could be prosecuted. Tax avoidance means using clever ideas to exploit loopholes in the law. It's legal but opinion is divided on the extent to which it is morally defensible. Tax planning is doing what you would have done anyway (if tax wasn't a consideration) but doing it in a way that means you pay less tax. In many cases, the government encourages us to do this because it wants to incentivise certain kinds of behaviour. Most people consider tax planning acceptable, especially when they are doing it themselves. Few of us want to voluntarily pay more tax than we have to. Having a personal pension or an ISA are both examples of sensible planning. That said, the boundary between avoidance and planning is subjective. Not everyone agrees about where it is. Chapter 5 looks at these issues in more detail.
Avoidance is possible because the tax system is awesomely complicated. But simplifying things is much harder than you would hope. So, we'll wind up the fifth chapter by looking at why tax reform is so difficult and why the law is so convoluted.
I started working as a tax accountant over 20 years ago. During the intervening period, I have had the privilege of advising some of the most prestigious and exciting companies in the world. However, you won't read about any of them in these pages. Rather than risk inadvertently giving away confidential information (or even appearing to do so when I haven't), I've steered clear of my own clients. The information in this book is either publicly available or an inference based on what's publicly available. By that, I mean material you can find on the internet (if you know where to look) or in published books. Where I have discussed real-world examples, I've done my best to verify what I've said through official documents. Facts and figures given in the text are current as at 1 January 2017.
I'd like to thank Jonathan Richards, Christopher Barton, Andrew Drysch, Rachel Phillipson and, most of all, my wife Vanessa for their helpful comments on the manuscript. Any remaining errors are entirely my responsibility. Thanks also to John Grogan as well as to Stephen Mullaly and his team at Wiley for all their hard work in turning this book into a reality.
Finally, all the opinions expressed in this book are mine alone. I don't expect that anyone will agree with all of them.
Chapter 1Taxes on your income and earnings
Income tax and national insurance
Income tax: when you think about tax, that's probably the tax you're thinking about. It was introduced by the Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, as a temporary measure in 1798 to fund the Napoleonic Wars. Legally, it's still temporary. Every year, Parliament has to vote for income tax to apply for another twelve months. If ever MPs failed to do so, the government would run out of money and have to shut down.
We all know that the basic rate of income tax is 20p in the pound and the higher rate is 40p. These headline figures are the UK's ‘marginal rates of tax’. When tax experts talk about the marginal rate of tax, they mean the rate you pay on each extra pound of income that you earn. Just looking at income tax, the first £11,000 you earn is tax free so the marginal rate up to this amount is nil. Then it increases to 20%, the basic rate. When you earn over £43,000 the marginal income tax rate goes up to the higher rate of 40%. So, if you are paid £20,000 a year, your marginal income tax rate is 20% because if your pay increases to £20,001, you have to pay 20p of income tax on the extra pound you earn.
A 20p marginal rate of income tax doesn't sound so bad compared to all the public services we enjoy, like healthcare and education. But you have to factor in employers' and employees' national insurance as well. These add 26p of tax on each extra pound a basic rate taxpayer earns.
On top of that, any welfare benefits received from the government are reduced as we earn more. Handing back your benefit payments acts like yet another form of taxation on each extra pound you earn. For the lower paid, the way that benefits are phased out as people start working means they can face marginal tax rates of up to 90%. We'll talk some more about that later in the chapter. For the middle classes, child benefit is clawed back if anyone in the family earns over £50,000. Having to pay back child benefit has the same effect on take-home pay as an increase in tax. This means income tax and national insurance, together with benefit payments, can combine to produce very high marginal tax rates.
In the Introduction, I showed how you probably need to earn £60 to buy a Lego truck worth £40, once you include income tax, national insurance and VAT. That's £20 in taxes. However, this amount factors in your personal allowance of £11,000 on which you don't have to pay income tax. Now imagine you needed to work some overtime before you could afford to buy the toy. You've already used up your personal allowance so you now have to look at your marginal tax rate to work out how long you need to work. As a basic rate income taxpayer, you would need to earn £70.60 in overtime to buy that £40 truck. Thanks to high marginal rates of tax, over £30 of the £70.60 that your employer pays you to work the overtime goes to the government. That's an overall tax rate of 43%. Add employers' national insurance and it’s 50% (see Figure 1.1). If you are a higher rate income taxpayer, your combined tax rate for ordinary purchases is 58%.
Figure 1.1 The taxes on a £40 Lego set for a basic rate taxpayer showing taxes coming to as much as the toy.
The way multiple taxes add up to big bucks is my First Golden Rule of tax: lots of small taxes together combine to make large tax bills. Rather than hit us with a single massive demand that we can't help feeling bad about, the system is organised into lots of smaller levies that accumulate. There are lots of different taxes with lots of different names charged on lots of different things. But, in the end, you and I end up paying them all.
Whether a tax is levied on the companies we work for, or the shops we buy from, it all comes out of our pockets. That's my Second Golden Rule of tax: no matter what name is on the bill, all tax is ultimately suffered by human beings. There is no magic pot of money for governments to dip into. Even when the government borrows, it must tax us in the future to pay back the debt. To understand your personal tax burden, you have to add up all taxes, even the ones that you don't pay directly and may not even know about.
National insurance contributions
We've seen that, as well as income tax, we also pay national insurance contributions on our salaries. It's time to have a closer look at this most misunderstood of taxes.
When you pay national insurance contributions (usually abbreviated to ‘NICs’), what exactly are you contributing to? Many people are vaguely aware of a link between national insurance and their state pension. Indeed, you need to have been paying NICs for 30 years to qualify for the full state pension (if you miss a few years out, you can catch up on them later).
Let's see what that means. Assume you are on average earnings of £26,500 throughout your 35-year working life. That means the combined employees' and employers' national insurance contributions paid on your salary will be about £4,750 a year. Now, suppose you invested that £4,750 a year in a private pension instead of paying it over to the government. With a growth rate of 5% above inflation (the long-run rate of return for shares), your notional pension pot from payments equivalent to your national insurance contributions should be worth over £430,000 when you retire. That would get you an index-linked pension at today's historically low annuity rates of £14,750 a year. A few years ago it would have got you considerably more and, once interest rates return to normal levels with the economic recovery, we can expect pension annuity rates to rise as well. Alternatively, under the new pension freedom rules, you could take that £430,000 as income or reinvest it.
The £14,750 a year pension you would have from saving £4,750 a year in a private pension scheme is a much better deal than the state pension of £8,094 that you really get for making those 35 years of contributions. Worse, if you work for longer (as most of us do) or pay higher NICs because you have higher earnings, you don't get a better state pension. The government does pay our national insurance contributions into a special fund separate from general taxation. But it is not investing the money to pay for your pension when you retire. The national insurance fund only has enough money in it to pay for about two months of benefits for today's claimants. In essence, it is a current account, not a savings account. The government collects money from people currently in work to pay pensions to today's retirees. There is no money set aside to fund pensions in the future. We are entirely reliant on our children being willing to cough up in the same way we have. So, looked at as a contributory pension scheme, national insurance is a very bad deal. However, we should instead regard NICs as another income tax with a different name. It accounts for a fifth of the government's revenues. Although it funds pensions and some other benefits, a large amount of it is used to pay for the NHS. Now, of course, the NHS needs funding and our taxes are the way to do it. But given national insurance contributions have no real contributory element and are really a tax on earnings, why don't we call them a tax?
The answer is one of low politics rather than high principle. At the most basic level, it's a manifestation of the First Golden Rule of tax: lots of small taxes together combine to make large tax bills. It suits the government that we pay multiple taxes with low rates rather than a single transparent and easily understood levy. The complexity of the tax system means no one ever realises how much he or she is paying. This makes it a whole lot easier to extract more tax from us without causing a revolution. Combining income tax with employees’ and employers’ national insurance into a single levy would give us a basic rate of income tax of about 45p in the pound. No government wants to admit that tax rates are that high. So they prefer the sleight of hand of having a 20p income tax rate, 12% employees' national insurance contributions and the essentially invisible 13.8% employers' national insurance contributions.
What, you might ask, is the difference between employers' and employees' national insurance? In all honesty: nothing. They are both taxes on your salary, they are both collected in the same way (through PAYE, which we will discuss further below) and your employer sees them both as amounts they have to pay to keep you turning up to work. The main distinction is that earnings are capped at £43,000 when calculating most of an employee's NICs (and the version paid by the self-employed). This recognises that, by earning more, you don't get better benefits or a bigger pension from the system. In fact, it was not until the 1970s that national insurance stopped being charged at a flat rate so that everyone paid the same. Thanks to Gordon Brown, you now also pay 2% NICs on your earnings over the £43,000 threshold.
Employers' NICs are 13.8% of our entire salary above £8,112 without any upper limit. That means employers' national insurance embodies the Golden Rules of tax: following the First Rule, it is kept separate from income tax, even though it is a tax on income. This disguises just how much we actually pay. It is also in accordance with the Second Golden Rule: no matter what name is on the bill, all tax is ultimately suffered by human beings. Because this element of national insurance is paid by our employers, we don't realise that we are suffering it. But, despite all the subterfuge, ordinary people still end up shelling out.
If you are in work, it's a good rule of thumb to treat NICs and income tax as the same thing, although there are, inevitably, various wrinkles and complications in the rules. For example, savers and pensioners pay income tax but not national insurance. When you factor in employers' NICs, this means there is twice as much tax on wages from work than on money you get from savings or your pension. This might make sense economically, since we do want to encourage saving. And maybe it is fair that pensioners, after being taxed all their lives, don't have to keep paying national insurance after they've retired. But that doesn't explain why wealthy pensioners are taxed a great deal less than low-paid workers.
In most respects, however, NICs and income tax are drawing ever closer together. For example, until 1991, there was no national insurance on many perks such as company cars. Even in the 1990s, it was still possible to exploit gaps between the rules on income tax and NICs. Some city firms were paying bonuses in gold or diamonds to avoid national insurance (which was payable on cash wages only).
More recently, both Labour and Conservative governments have been ironing out the smaller wrinkles to make national insurance and income tax as similar as possible. Nowadays, many benefits in kind, including company cars, are subject to both income tax and employers' national insurance. They go on a special form called a P11D and you pay tax on the monetary value of a benefit as if it were cash. As it happens, one of the most tax-efficient perks available today is not turning up to work. If you take extra holiday as a benefit (and many firms allow their employees a few extra days a year in exchange for sacrificing some of their salary), the cost to you is only the pay you would have received after tax.
