Friday, February 14, 2014

Rod Liddle's innovative ideas about tax planning

I came across this wonderful expose on the Sage Exchange, Accountancy community blog. Rod Liddle is a guest writer there and, in an intro piece about his own approach to accountancy and tax, he explains his attitude to tax planning as follows:
"In the short-term I've tried to interest my accountants in reconfiguring Friar Luca Paciolis' famous formula for double-entry bookkeeping to incorporate two new values when calculating my tax bill: n, which represents a sum of money to be deducted from my taxable income based upon how nice I have been to people during the year, as estimated by myself, and x which represents a sum of money I have received from somewhere and do not wish the tax people to know about.
So the re-written formula would read: Assets = L+C-D-N+R(-X)-E. 
I firmly believe that this innovation is the single greatest contribution to accountancy since the renaissance (and, with respect to Fra Pacioli, perhaps before), and I suspect that all of your clients will agree when they see those nice subtraction signs in the formula.  
I should not really claim sole credit for this innovation as I have drawn on important pioneering work by certain accounting experts (I refer you to studies by K. Dodd, L. Piggott and especially ground-breaking work in the US from W. Snipes). 
I've already mentioned it to my accountant but he got that horrible weary look on his face and at one point suggested I take my business elsewhere."
You can read the full piece here >>>

No comments:

T-shirts for accountants

Perhaps the original here was the T-shirt that offered a definition of an accountant: "Someone who does precision guesswork, based on u...