This month, I am inviting those of our readers who run a business with me on an arduous journey to the moral high ground. It’s not an area that business people tend to be very used to – not, in my view, because standards of right and wrong are any less marked in the business community as compared with employees and those dependent on the income of others, but because we business people are used to being treated either as if we were crooks or the next worst thing.
So I hope this month’s article will give a lot of us some pure mountain air to breathe.
Don’t run away with the idea that this is just another moral diatribe, short on useful advice and information. In the course of what follows, I hope to show you how, in running a business, you can save tax – and feel good about it.
First, though, the case for the prosecution. It’s very much the case that most talking and thinking about tax these days is done from the point of view of HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), that is the people who have a particularly acute angle on the raising of the most tax possible, as soon as possible. The view of HMRC overflows into a particularly simplistic (in fact, much too simplistic) view, expressed in some magazines and newspapers, that we have some kind of moral duty to pay as much tax as possible as soon as possible.
The next word in this article has been excised on the grounds of this being a family paper!
Presumably, if this view were correct, anything you do that resulted in your paying less tax, or paying tax later, would be morally wrong; so, how about the old favourite example of giving up smoking, or working less hard? The government would certainly get less tax if you did either of these"
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