As I hope many Tax Journal readers saw the Office of Tax Simplification (OTS) recently reached its first publishing milestone with a list of the tax reliefs that fall under the ambit of HMRC (see www.lexisurl.com/RBN4r). The total (1 042) is a number that took me and I suspect many others slightly aback.
Our brief is to review the reliefs and make recommendations for simplification. That may raise vistas of reliefs being scythed away but that is not our aim. For a start we can only recommend: Ministers will decide what to do. Our – and I think their – aim is for revenue neutral reforms that make the system run more efficiently. That might mean delivering available tax relief money through another route if a relief doesn’t work.
We also published our proposed strategy for reviewing this little list (‘Background and Approach’). The...
