Welcome to the final Daily Insight of the week. If you are new to the site, this is our regular trawl through the day’s finance and accounting headlines where I get to share the stories that made me stop and think.
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Tax-averse Knotty Ash comic
Anyway that’s the commercial break over, so on with the serious stuff. Ken Dodd, the 90-year-old tax-averse Knotty Ash comic who died this week, has had the last laugh with the HMRC. And it’s not me saying that. It’s everyone!
Virtually all media organisations in the UK, from the Sun to accountingWEB, used the same ‘last laugh’ headline to describe Doddy’s final tax ‘dodge’. He was fined for serial tax evasion after a high profile court case in 1989. At that time, it was revealed that Ken had about 300 grand packed in suitcases in his attic.
Now, worth about £7.2 million, he married his long-term partner a couple of days before he passed, in an effort, it would seem, to avoid paying about £2 million “to the taxman”. Funny thing, money.
Tax avoidance crackdown
Now I don’t know if this is coincidental but, not long after digesting the news about Doddy, I found this headline on the ICAEW’s website economia. “Treasury announces tax avoidance crackdown.”
On Thursday, the finance act, which includes “tough” measures to address VAT fraud and close loopholes on offshore tax avoidance, received royal assent.
Unpaid VAT
Economia says: “The measures are aimed at making online marketplaces like Amazon or Ebay more responsible for paying unpaid VAT of their sellers.
“Online marketplaces are liable for VAT where they knew or should have known that an overseas online seller should have been VAT-registered but was not.”
The Treasury also aims to deter high earners from using complicated structures to avoid reporting how much they really earn, and rogue operators of illegal landfill sites will be forced to pay tax.
Have a great weekend!