One of the stranger parts of today's Today programme was the business section. There was a geezer plugging his book about gambling, in which he documents how to make a living out of placing bets on things. He had had several notable successes, including tipping Spain to win the football world cup.

One of the more unpleasant parts of his interview was where he referred to what he called a "facespitter" bet. This is a win that's so large that you can go up to your boss and spit in his face. You'll lose your job, for sure, but can live off your winnings instead.

I found it rather alarming when he described how large a facespitter bet would be. £40,000. Even allowing for the fact that gambling winnings don't attract income tax (although, see below), this is a pitifully small amount of money. If used to buy a flat rate annuity, perhaps a silly thing to do in today's inflationary climate, it would generate £2,000 a year, or about £40 a week. Is that worth losing your job for?

Or perhaps he imagines he'll need a lot of facespitters in his lifetime. It's hardly a comfortable existence.

I save the old fashioned way, in shares, and I know precisely how much more I need to save before I can spit in my boss's face, not that I ever would. As of now, it's another £268,000. That's a lot of money, but it's broadly achievable. And a great deal more honest than some shyster exploiting people's financial illiteracy and claiming you can get by on less.

Oh, and I believe (would welcome confirmation from a tax expert) that HMRC will treat otherwise tax exempt income as taxable if it becomes your trade. So, gambling income ordinarily isn't taxed, but will be at the point at which you become a professional gambler. You were warned!

Written on my Android mobile phone. Article may be edited later.

Filed under: Current issues, Economics with tags bbc, gambling, pensions, saving, spitting, today programme
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Tax avoidance is, in the words of our dear friend, Ritchie:

seeking to pay less than the tax due as required by the spirit of the law by getting round the law.

In other words, tax avoidance is the (ab)use of law in ways that weren't intended. Compliance, by contrast, requires the taxpayer to pay what's due, not just according to the strict letter of the law, but also according to its spirit. Questions about whether a particular bit of behaviour is within or without the spirit of the law are dealt with by the courts.

So, today's announcement that the government itself will be doing "the minimum" to comply with a supreme court ruling that sex offenders must be allowed to appeal their lifelong inclusion on the Sex Offenders Register is interesting. Because it blows apart the moral case that taxpayers should do anything other than "the minimum" to comply with tax law. Any behaviour that is either unchallenged in or approved by the courts must be tax compliant. If it weren't, the courts would rule differently.

And today, government gave its blessing to begrudging bare minimum compliance. UKUncut, take note

Written on my Android mobile phone. Article may be edited later.

Filed under: Politics, Taxation with tags richard murphy, sex offenders register, supreme court, tax avoidance, ukuncut
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Ah, UKUncut.  The most dishonest, scumbaggy set of shabby protestors the country has ever known.

They set up their ramshackle campaign off the back of Vodafone settling with HMRC over its tax liabilities in Luxembourg.  Without getting too technical, HMRC was keen to avoid the case being referred to the European Court of Appeal, so it was worth its while to settle.  For Vodafone, it removed the overhanging fear of another long, expensive round of litigation.  But UKUncut got it in their heads that, rather than the £2bn originally provided, or the £1bn eventually paid, Vodafone owed £6bn.  And that if only we could get Vodafone to pay £6bn more tax this year, and indeed every year, this would reduce the deficit without having to cut £6bn of services.  UKUncut was born.

Then they turned their attention to Sir Philip Green, the genius who turned Top Shop around from a hopeless, failing set of retail stores into a thriving UK high street chain. He made a lot of money in the process too, and UKUncut think that he didn't pay his taxes along the way.  But the company has paid its taxes. And then it decided to pay up a giant dividend to its ultimate beneficial shareholder, Sir Philip's wife, who happens to live in another country.  As our tax system isn't generally in the business of taxing foreigners who don't live here, there was no further tax to pay.

So, despite having a modest amount of public support, UKUncut were still rather scrabbling around looking for some facts to support them.  They tried Boots.  Boots was taken private a few years ago and loaded up with debt.  Debt interest, unlike dividends on ordinary shares, is tax deductible. So Boots has gone from paying rather a lot of tax to, er, not so much.  Queue inevitable outrage from UKUncut. Yet, one company's interest expense is another company's interest income. So there's still just as much profitability (if not more), it's just not all in the same place.

That's three big campaigns and three enormous failures to make the charges stick.  So I'm delighted to read that UKUncut will now be targeting banks.  This is virtually an explicit declaration that they have categorically failed to identify even one company that is avoiding tax in a material way. So they're confessing that their campaign has no factual basis but is instead a cynical greedy ideology-fuelled attempt to steal other people's money to fund their own political objectives.  Like many others, I will be seeking to factcheck the statements they make in case they're tempted to resort to telling lies for political impact.

Filed under: Current issues, Politics with tags banks, boots, lies, sir philip green, topshop, ukuncut, vodafone
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A few days back, ICAEW mentioned on Twitter that they had gotten a new website.  By and large it looks quite a lot like I remember the last one looking. The main differences are that:

• finally, only about ten years after they should have done, they've fixed their URL problem. Seasoned chartered accountants will remember that ICAEW URLs used to be about three times longer than any other company's URLs. Well, now they're at least legible, if a bit long.
• they seem to have introduced some social media concepts - you can now rate pages or tweet about individual pages right from within the website.

Unfortunately, there still seem to be some teething problems.  Pages that have been advertised as recently as February's Accountancy magazine no longer work - for example www.icaew.com/narrowingthegap, at least at the time of writing. This can happen from Google searches too. So a search for VAT might yield this page, which (again, at the time of writing) leads to the dreaded 404 page.

There's also something very odd happening on their press releases page. The newsroom has stories for 2010, 2009 and 2008 but nothing for 2011. In fact, it has no 'Latest news' at all. There's nothing that is 'most viewed' and nothing under the 'Editor's choice'.  The 'Opinion' articles all give you the dreaded 404 page.  It tells you to "check back soon" without giving you any confidence that there's any point. At least they have some BBC news in the sidebar ("Ex tells of Raoul Moat gun terror"). But the rest of it's an absolute shambles.

There are some files you can find via Google search that look like they're not supposed to be there.  Then there's a recurrence of their pubic rash problem (e.g. here) we reported earlier before.  Add to that some curious results from the "Most viewed" pages (e.g. one page which tells you that the most viewed page is "Pakistan", "Pakistan", "Pakistan", "Pakistan"... all of which link to exactly the same page) and you're left wondering whether the ICAEW checked whether the website cake was fully cooked before taking it out of the oven.  At the moment it's most certainly half-baked.

What are your favourite ICAEW website howlers? Add them in the comments.

Filed under: Current issues, Institutes with tags accountancy magazine, disaster, icaew, shambles, twitter, vat, website
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After a desperately long and inexplicable wait, the European Commission has finally published a summary of responses to the audit green paper. It has also, a bit menacingly, published "the contributions authorised for publication." There seem to be nearly 700 of these, a phenomenal number.

Written on my Android mobile phone. Article may be edited later.

Filed under: Auditing, Current issues with tags big 4, ec green paper, european commission
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Thanks to a link from Ian Fraser, I'm informed that Streatham's very own Chuka Umunna is seeking to get Lord Green chucked off a cabinet committee that will take decisions on the format of future banking regulation.

Green was chairman of HSBC, Britain's biggest bank, until December, which has made Umunna concerned that the new trade minister is facing a conflict of interest. Umunna raised the subject at the Treasury select committee last week and has this weekend written to cabinet secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell to demand clarity.

In the letter, Umunna said: "It is important that government makes decisions relating to the future of our banking system in the national interest and not in the interests of any particular interest group."

He continued: "I would respectfully suggest that to avoid any perceived or actual conflict of interest between his ministerial office and long association with HSBC, the proper course would be for Lord Green to remove himself from playing any part in the decision-making processes relating to the government's response to the [commission]."

Lord Green's association with the particular institution HSBC is by the by. It's his expertise in banking that's needed for the committee.  Although one can argue about whether HSBC benefited from the overall government guarantee that no major UK-based bank would fail and although it took massive writedowns, HSBC didn't need bailout money from the government.  The man clearly knows a thing or two about running a massive bank for the long term.  And it's not as if his chairmanship of HSBC is some kind of secret. Just imagine:

Committee member 1: So, chaps, what shall we do about these banks, eh?

Committee member 2: Er, shall we break them up?  What do you all think?

Committee member 3: I don't really know... er...

Lord Green: I think we should leave them all be.

All committee members: Good idea, Stephen! Righty ho, triples all round!!

It's naive to presuppose that a single man, with very well disclosed interests in HSBC, could hope to throw the committee's judgement in his own favour, even if he were so inclined.

Anyway, while we're on the subject of inappropriate memberships of committees, on what basis is Chuka Umunna qualified to be on Treasury Committee? Sure he's done a bit of law, but what does he know about finance, banking or corporate governance? Judging by his facile intervention over Lord Green - nothing.

Filed under: Current issues, Politics with tags banks, chuka umunna, hsbc, idiots, stephen green, treasury committee
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In the February issue of Accountancy magazine, there's an article in the Institute pages about the ICAEW's submission to the government's investigation into the lack of women in boardrooms.

Now, there are some obvious, bad reasons why women aren't able to get onto company boards.  Maybe they aren't part of the "old boys" network.  Or perhaps they're felt to not fit in with the other old, mostly white, men who are already on the board. We already have laws that should eliminate this sort of unacceptable discrimination.

In addition to these, there are also some sensible reasons why women aren't getting onto boards.  Perhaps they don't want to. Or maybe it's down to taking a break to have children, which either disrupts their career progression or delays it while their male colleagues pull ahead. It's a fair question whether there are changes that can be made to reduce the impact of some of these factors.

It's a delicate subject which requires delicate handling.  So the choice of photograph to accompany the article is really very unfortunate.  They seem to have picked gone for a picture of a girl with the prettiest face and largest norks they can find. Yes, she is a girl; she looks like she's about 20 years old. And, rather than wearing the traditional office attire that's required of men - well starched shirt with double cuff shirt, windsor-knot tie, and sober suit - she seems to be wearing some sort of t-shirt.

There are some serious issues to be debated here. But the choice of picture completely trivialises the issue.  All it does is reinforce the stereotype that women on boards are there to provide some sort of eye candy for lecherous old men. Accountancy magazine really does need to do a lot better.

Filed under: Corporate governance, Other blogs with tags accountancy magazine, discrimination, gender pay gap, icaew
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