TAXTOPIA: How I Discovered the Injustices, Scams and Guilty Secrets of the Tax Evasion Game

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You’re not meant to know about tax. It’s kept complex for a reason. If you really knew what was going on, you’d… want to rebel,” Taxtopia states. “Across the world, tax systems are designed to let the richest people off.” In the process, the author says he hopes readers will begin to see that the UK tax system is rigged in favour of the wealthy. For each tax that the book breaks down, such as income, capital gains, VAT, inheritance and corporation tax, we are also shown the many methods rich people and their team of accountants will use to avoid it. Let’s be honest: this vastly simplified tax regime is almost certainly never, ever going to be introduced. But is that because it’s a bad set of ideas? Or because the rich and powerful would simply never stand for it – while the rest of us are too used to the way things are? The synopsis for his début title reads: “The Rebel Accountant has broken ranks to share his journey from clueless naïf to skilled tax consultant and in doing so blows the lid off the murky world of making the tax burdens of the ultra-wealthy disappear. In the topsy-turvy world of tax avoidance, you can get richer by buying a yacht, the world’s biggest exporter of coffee is Switzerland, and billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump and the Duke of Westminster often pay less tax than you do. Excludes Accountant & Manager support for other unrelated tax years. This support, regarding the tax minimisation and tax position, is only available for the relevant tax year(s) that the service is being provided for.

When Jimmy Carr was revealed in 2012 to be using the K2 scheme – whereby his income was paid directly into a Jersey-based trust, which then loaned him money he never had to repay – he apologised but explained: “I met with a financial adviser and he said to me: ‘Do you want to pay less tax? It’s totally legal.’ I said: ‘Yes’.” His day job, he tells me, “can be as simple as saying: don’t sell that thing this year, sell it next year, because you’ll pay less tax. Or it can involve convoluted international structures for large corporations.” But he is a rebel with a cause: he would like the UK to have a tax system so fair and simple that jobs like his didn’t exist, because there would be no loopholes to exploit. Effectively the richer you are the more you get to decide whether you’d rather pay tax or give to charity (or in some cases neither).” Taxtopia's anonymous author has done the impossible - created a hilarious and deeply troubling expose about how the world's shady tax system is exploited and proves what we always suspected - that our tax system is rigged against us. Read it and weep.' - Geraint Anderson author of City Boy

I’d always accepted that the tax system in big western democracies was stupidly over-complicated, and that the law allowed people to weave through those laws to arrive at their most beneficial outcome….But depriving one of the world’s poorest countries of tax revenues using bogus transfer prices while stripping their forests bare seemed a step too far.” The companies – and individuals – choosing how much tax they pay

Finally we get an analysis of Universal Credit, lambasting the fact that someone on UC who gets a job loses 55% of his benefit, so is effectively paying a 55% tax rate, while a millionaire accountancy partner is paying a 51% rate. The Taxtopia Solution But this comes to the crux of the problem he’s highlighting: they don’t need to. There are enough legal ways for wealthy people to avoid tax anyway without resorting to breaking the law, even if plenty of them skirt pretty close or are downright unethical. But nothing happened – “Ernst & Young’s profits went up and Lewis was knighted by the Queen”. That’s because when HM Treasury investigated the Isle of Man leasing company, it found no evidence of VAT fraud as it had

How I Discovered the Injustices, Scams and Guilty Secrets of the Tax Evasion Game

Taxtopia takes the lid off the secret world of tax avoidance and reveals just how tax advisers have enabled their big wealthy clients to mitigate, minimise, or escape entirely the tax obligations that bind us little people. The technical stuff is often in chatty footnotes full of jokes, while the narrative lays bare the absurd and unjust complexities of a tax system designed by accountants, he says, to keep them in work. was only doing what countless other UHNW (ultra high net worth) individuals are doing all over the world right now – just look at how difficult it has been for Western nations to seize the yachts of sanctioned Russian oligarchs”. Aggressive tax avoidance, on the other hand, is when someone complies with the letter of the law but aims to “ subvert its purpose”.

In TAXTOPIA a rogue accountant breaks ranks to share his journey from clueless na f to skilled tax consultant -and in doing so blows the lid on the murky world of making the tax burdens of the ultra-wealthy disappear. You’ve chosen TAXOPIA LITE, a self-lodgment service. Please be aware that tax offices are starting to phase-out DIY paper lodgments and are encouraging the transition to digital.

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Ah yes, those devious accountants. They usually manage to slip away without any of us learning their names, even if all the celebrities blame them.