Tax Avoidance

Debate between Nigel Mills and John Pugh

Wednesday 16th June 2010 Westminster Hall

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Dr McCrea.

Until the election, I was employed by one of the large firms of accountants, although I assure the hon. Member for Southport (Dr Pugh) that I was not involved in tax avoidance. My role was to seek up-front agreements with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, which was generally more than happy to enter into such agreements with my clients. I am not guilty of the things of which he accuses accountants. I have practised as a tax adviser since 1996, so I remember the previous Government’s attempt to introduce a general anti-avoidance rule in 1997-98, and I can just about recall why that attempt failed.

I agree with much of what the hon. Gentleman said. It is clearly right to tackle tax avoidance and it is important that the new Government continue to do that job. I accept that the previous Government took many effective measures on that front—the move towards targeted anti-avoidance rules and the principles-based approach was the most effective way forward. However, if we are to get the deficit down, we need to increase tax revenue, so we need to attract taxpayers to the UK and encourage them to remain here. A general anti-avoidance rule in principle may not be a brilliant way of doing that.

[Dr Pugh]

I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman has any evidence of that. We have enough examples worldwide of such rules being implemented. We ought to be beyond the stage of simply suggesting that it can happen. We should be able to point to empirical data showing that that is exactly what has happened in places such as Hong Kong.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nigel Mills]

The hon. Lady is correct. The previous Government happened on what is probably the right balance, which is to have principles-based rules targeted at commonly exploited rules, so that taxpayers know when they are wandering on to dangerous ground and therefore need to deal with those rules, rather than having a general principle that might apply to every tax in every situation. The hon. Gentleman mentioned that it puts the burden on taxpayers to declare that what they are doing has a mainly economic benefit rather than being an attempt at tax avoidance. That is a huge burden to put on taxpayers. I am not sure that we should put the burden of knowing how to comply with a general rule in complicated and innocent situations on to every payer of every tax in the country. I am not sure if that is what he intends.

[Dr Pugh]

Some of us laboured long and hard over controlled foreign companies. I remember one difficulty was deciding how different transactions should be linked and/or broken up. Anyone reading the legislation, highly specific as it is, will have to do an enormous amount of work—no less than if they had to apply a general principle to their circumstances.

[Nigel Mills]

I have some familiarity with the controlled foreign company rules, or at least the previous version—I never had to get too close to the attempt to reformulate them. Yes, they are incredibly complicated and they were complicated before, although there was a purpose exemption in the previous rules that was in some cases helpful. I would not necessarily suggest that the new Government should exactly follow the approach that was taken to reforming those rules, because it was a long drawn out process which is, I think, still incomplete.

If we are to tackle avoidance without going down the general anti-avoidance rule route—if the Minister is minded to go down that way, I suspect that by the time he has gone through the full gamut of consultation, he will be backing off quickly—perhaps we should look at overall solutions for tackling the problem rather than proceeding on that basis alone. Targeted purpose rules in areas of tax that are commonly exploited are the better way to go. As a way forward in tackling tax avoidance, we want simple, clear legislation so that the intention of Parliament is clear and both tax authorities and taxpayers can understand the aim of the law and what the rules are. That will help to support the moral argument: if we all understand the right amount of tax to pay in a situation, everyone should be paying it. The present complexity gives people the veneer of an excuse when they structure transactions in an artificial way.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned tax havens. There is a lot of scope for tax planning using other EU nations that have very different tax regimes or much lower tax rates in some situations. I am sure that the Minister has found in his in-tray a load of pending or ongoing cases at the European Court of taxpayers claiming that they have suffered tax that does not comply with various EU treaties. Roughly how much tax is the Exchequer in danger of losing or having to pay back as a result of those cases? It is important when looking at tax law to make it compliant with systems outside the UK, but it is difficult to do.

My area of expertise was transfer pricing. We were forced to apply transfer pricing rules on transactions within the UK, rather than just cross-border ones, which added a huge compliance burden that, frankly, taxpayers were not desperately excited by and the tax authorities did not have anything at stake on. I hope that we can find better ways of writing tax law that do not add to that burden. Perhaps some tweaks to European treaties would have been a better way of sorting this and creating OECD-compliant tax law, rather than using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

If we want to tackle tax-avoidance effectively, let us have simple, clear legislation, and where there is abuse, let us have targeted, principles-based anti-avoidance rules that state clearly that the intent of Parliament is to stop one-sided complex financing transactions that have no commercial benefit and get a big tax advantage. In that way, we will make the progress that the hon. Gentleman wants.