My apologies here, but I simply must ask this question. Are we now promoting driveling idiots to the top of the bureaucracy?
Speaking at last week’s annual ICAEW Wyman Symposium, HMRC director general
Dave Hartnett made a colourful speech in which he….‘Tax administrators want advisers to take a deep breath and stop complaining.
My colleagues feel oppressed by constant criticism,’
Diddums there. But this is far worse:
Hartnett has often said that the [accountancy] profession needs to help the taxman more in
the fight against tax avoidance.
I beg your pardon? Tax avoidance is not only legal, it is the very reason you hire an accountant in the first place. What in buggery are you talking about when you ask that they help you, rather than the people who actually pay their bills keep some fraction of their own income?
He
said that every country involved in a recent OECD project believed that tax
advisers and their actions had an adverse effect on government budgets.
Yes, that’s the point of them all right.
‘Without reservation they think advisers had undermined spending plans by
governments,’ Hartnett said.
They’re supposed to.
Look, I don’t mind the taxman complaining about the effectiveness of tax advisors, nor about the idiocy of the laws (with their multifarious loopholes) which dim politicians have given them to adminster. But to complain that the people hired to guide people through the system at the least expense actually guide them through the system at the least expense is simply drivel.
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