Taxing times

Is it only me...but this man has done nothing wrong...another one.

This has not been a good week for those of us trying to run businesses and doing our best to build customer focused enterprises.

Firstly Stephen Hester takes a kicking for having the nerve to take what he is entitled to; then, despite my pleas to the contrary, the Apparatchiks egged on by the Two Caesars and the Last Lot, decide to treat Sir Fred Goodwin in the same way as Anthony Blunt, Robert Mugabe and Nicolae Ceausescu and give him a right going over for doing the right thing for his shareholders; and now Ed Lester, CEO at the Student Loans Company, is being pummelled because he took action to minimise his tax bill, legally.

It is time to put an end to this hysterical lynch mob and learn to revere and respect our business leaders before they decide to jack it all in and retreat to living on benefits, albeit if they are capped at £34,000 gross.

All of us want to pay less tax. And many of us take whatever actions we can take to minimise the tax avoidance opportunities available to us. We save through tax free ISAa. We invest in tax free pensions. We optimise the tax benefits from things like nursery vouchers and the like. And don’t we all take of advantage of every allowance going that will reduce our tax bill. All perfectly legal and above board.

And this is all that Ed Lester did. He took perfectly sensible steps to minimise his tax bill. So why the fuss?

It is also worth pointing out that lest anyone think that Mr Lester is not paying any tax whatsoever, he will be paying VAT on any fees he receives, corporation tax on profits from his own private company and income tax on any dividends or salary payments he receives from said company. He will be responsible for his own pension provision and will not be entitled to any of the company perks and conditions of service that many of us think of as a right of employment. So it’s swings and roundabouts for Mr Lester.

And to make matters worse, parliamentary time is being used up to discuss and debate this issue. The Public Accounts Committee is to investigate. And Treasury Apparatchiks are combing every nook and cranny at our expense trying to work out who said what to whom and when. All perfectly acceptable actions to take if wrong doing was involved but while tax evasion is illegal, tax avoidance is not.

Yet again another innocent man is hounded and pilloried and torn apart by a pack of political wolfhounds. Do you think our political elite might be trying to deflect attention from something? I wonder.

It might only be me but I would like to suggest that since this man and the other businessmen mentioned above had done nothing wrong, that our Politicos stop hounding those who are trying to do the right thing and they start to focus on the issues of import that I am paying you to address. And that does not include chocolate oranges, totally legal business behaviours or wonky weather.

Have a great week.

Sis felix. Et sis fortunatus.