Remarkable story about our top civil servants: they are all using the ‘private company’ loopholes to avoid paying the correct rate of tax, and have been doing so for some time. At least two thousand of the monkeys and that’s before you count the same level of management bureaucrats in the NHS and of course local government. The cost to the exchequer for the two thousand alone has been put at £30m.
You can look at it two ways, I suppose. Either you argue that people are entitled to use whatever legal scams they can to protect their own incomes — a recourse which is not morally acceptable for a Labour politician, I would suggest. Or you believe that people should pay the amount of tax, at source, that the country intends them to pay. I cleave to the second point of view — at least partly from a sense of missed opportunity, as I have about 12 employers and could very easily justify calling myself a private company, instead of what is really the case, a single sniping pig.
Whatever the case, I will certainly be rude to the tax people when they start threatening me for being late with my payments. Hell, maybe I’m the only self-employed monkey in the country who pays by the spirit of the law as well as the letter. Am I being stupid? If I believe in higher rates of tax it would be wrong to avoid paying the ‘correct’ amount myself, wouldn’t it?
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