The Office of Tax Simplification was officially established by George Osborne and David Gauke, the Exchequer Secretary, on Tuesday.
Two tax experts have been appointed to the board on an interim basis and they will have the responsibility of identifying areas where the tax system could be simplified to help businesses and individual taxpayers.
Michael Jack is the former financial secretary to the Treasury and he will chair the OTS, whilst John Whiting is the tax policy director at the CIOT and will perform the same duty for the OTS one day per week. Whiting is understandably delighted to have been given the opportunity to help simplify the country’s tax system, a measure he believes is long overdue.
Over the next 12 months, the OTS is going to undertake reviews on small business tax simplification and tax reliefs. Initial findings on tax reliefs will be published in the late autumn, whilst the small business tax review findings will be published before next year’s Budget. Of particular interest to freelancers and limited company contractors in the small business tax review is the remit to find an alternative to the hated IR35 regulation that has dogged the self-employed for more than a decade.
In addition to the newly appointed board members, The OTS will be drawing on the expertise of external legal and tax professionals who will focus on advising the board on specific areas of the UK’s complex tax system.
The Government wants the UK to be the most competitive of the G20 countries and they believe one way to do this is to reduce the complexities in our tax system. The size of the current tax code has doubled to over 11,000 pages in the last 10 years and we have slipped down to 13th in the Global Competitiveness Index compiled by the World Economic Forum.
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