Tax cheats have less variation in hairstyles than benefit cheats

On Radio 4's The Now Show, Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis recently suggested (series 31 episode 3) that:

"To the British, defrauding the DSS is a crime; defrauding HMRC is more of a sport."

To highlight the difference in approach they referenced the two separate online forms at Direct.gov.uk

"The tax evasion hotline information report form and the 'report a benefit thief online form".

And they then compared aspects of the two forms:

"When grassing up the suspected villain, the tax fraud form asks you to provide approximate age, national insurance number and brief description of the person. The benefit fraud form asks you for: ethnic group, their build, their eye colour, eye wear, hair colour, hair type. It then gives you a separate menu of hair type options which include: afro, bald, dirty, dreadlocks, greasy, long, mohican, pony tail. All the classic hairstyles of the potentially criminal. And, brilliantly, 'wig'. That's right, if you're living next door to a toupee'd ethnic with glasses, get online now."

Fun accountant related tweets

Sometimes I wonder how do accountants stay awake at work. All the numbers are making me sleepy.
-dk

This girl says she went to an accounting seminar met interesting people including accountants. Really? How about marine biologists?
-fabianlawless

Between this weather, crazy clients and outlandish demands I'm ready to pack it in as a photographer and become an accountant like my dad :(
-meeners

Am now officially a grown up. I have an accountant and have just received tax advice.
-tshickle

Just recommended me a 'goth accountant'. If the tax man doesn't pay up I'll have him hexed.
-dividividv

Found a tiny scrap of paper which proves firstly I'm not going mad, and secondly I don't have to pay £650 to my old accountant!
-invisiblea

Ron Artest just thanked his psychiatrist. If it was me I would thank my florist, my proctologist and my tax accountant .. in that order.
-jperk1

How easy will it be to keep E&Y apart from new neighbours PwC?

How neighbourly will E&Y and PwC be once the latter has fully occupied its new offices in More London - adjacent to the longer standing E&Y offices that have been there a while?

The Telegraph reported that "Blackout curtains beckoned" as both firms realise there will be scope for industrial espionage - at their closest point the two offices are only about 10m apart.
On the FCAblog I noted one insider commenting:

As an occupant of E&Y's premises, I can exclusively reveal that we're going to deploy psychological warfare against the new neighbours - firing lasers into their windows, blasting propaganda speeches and brass band music through loudspeakers 24 hours a day, and hanging a 9-storey high picture of our beneficently smiling global chairman on the side of our office. They won't hold out for long.

Nice one!

Hugh Dennis at the Taxation awards

At last week's Taxation annual awards ceremony, comic host Hugh Dennis told us that the LexisNexis Taxation awards was the most ridiculously named Taxation awards he had ever been to. "Indeed the only taxation awards I've ever been to".

Sticking with the company name, LexisNexis, he suggested that perhaps it was "the teletubby that time forgot, or the teletubby who went to Monaco. Lala and Po didn't want to redomicile - they just went into forestry."

Amongst his other tax related one-liners were:

"Until yesterday I thought that IHT was something women used as contraception and that a P11D was a Diesel version of a P11"

"The only thing I do know, is that, in my experience, the Married man's allowance is... about once a month"

Ok - perhaps you had to be there.

30 years on - What would Rip Van Winkle think?

Professor John Kay presented the Chartered Tax Advisers' Address earlier this week: "30 years of tax policy".

His talk was peppered with references to what Rip Van Winkle might think about key aspects of tax policy, after being absent from the UK tax policy environment for 30 years. He concluded that many of the key issues are much the same today as they were 30 years ago.

At the end of his talk however he generated much laughter from the sizeable audience by observing that:

"The final thing that Rip Van Winkle would do is to pick up the tax code to see if it were any shorter..."

The 'Death Tax' - a film, as seen by The Now Show

During recent debates about long term funding of the elderly, the Tories denounced Labour's plans for a compulsory levy, as a 'Death Tax'.

Steve Punt has suggested this sounded like 'a slightly dull horror film', and imagines how this might play out:

Zombies have returned from the grave; only one woman can stop them: Moira Stewart is: The Zombie Hunter, in "28 per cent later".

When attacked by a Zombie Moira is heard to say: "Don't forget, pay by January 31st or...I'll chop your head off"

The Zombie continues it's attack and we hear the sound of Moira's axe fulfilling her threat. She then warns us, ominously, "And remember, tax doesn't have to be... Axing!"

Broadcast on 2 April 2010 during The Now Show on Radio 4.

And you thought tax evasion was bad in the UK....

ATHENS — In the wealthy, northern suburbs of this city, where summer temperatures often hit the high 90s, just 324 residents checked the box on their tax returns admitting that they owned pools.

So tax investigators studied satellite photos of the area — a sprawling collection of expensive villas tucked behind tall gates — and came back with a decidedly different number: 16,974 pools.

Reported in New York Times on 1 May 2010. Full story here: Greek Wealth Is Everywhere but Tax Forms