Ian King writes in today’s Times (£) on the ten ways he would simplify the tax system - a topic the TPA has talked about a lot over the past few years.
Merging Income Tax and National Insurance would be a very positive step to bring simplicity and much greater transparency to one of the government’s major revenue raisers.
There are areas we disagree on, for example King suggests merging Inheritance Tax and Capital Gains tax where we would like to see the former scrapped and the latter rolled into a single income tax (along with National Insurance). As part of the scrapping of Inheritance Tax we would be able to get rid of about one tenth of our tax code and many of the associated (and complicated) reliefs, a principle which we would like to be applied much more widely, for example to Corporation Tax.
Our tax plan is available in our Single Income Tax report and while we may occasionally disagree with other people’s ideas or priorities it is very pleasing to see this issue on the agenda.