HLE blogger James Wilson ponders the morality of tax avoidance
"Jimmy Carr and his K2 tax-minimising cohorts have attracted their share of detractors for using a tax-avoidance scheme which reduced the amount payable on their income to about 2%. It is a familiar debate: where is the line drawn between tax avoidance (legal) and tax evasion (illegal)? Is tax even moral to begin with?
Carr has had a slightly unlikely apologist in the form of the Rev Dr Peter Mullen, a priest of the Church of England.
Mullen, writing in The Telegraph, argues that: ‘Reasonably and legitimately, within the confines of the law, to avoid paying more tax than one needs to pay is no more dishonest than, say, the effort of a working man to sell his labour to the highest bidder.’
Of course, the simple answer is for tax loopholes to be closed. And, of course, that is very much easier said than done. Thus we are left with the endless game whereby HMRC closes one loophole and another is discovered. With a tax system as complex as Britain’s, it seems that the battle will never be over. Nor is it anything new: Alan Coren’s feuilleton Tax Brittanica was probably not far off the mark, with his fictional Roman accountant, Dubious Abacus, running rings around the hapless tax inspector Miscellaneous Onus in 408 AD.
However, Dr Mullen goes on to a rather wider issue. He writes: ‘There is a very deep issue here. For if something that is allowed as quite legal and above board is at the same time, as some in these same high places have declared, unacceptable and immoral, then that sets up a fatal disjunction between law and morality.’
One would hope that each of our laws has a moral justification, allowing for the fact that even within an ethical framework such as the modern conception of Judeo-Christianity that forms the basis of English law there will always be room for disagreement on particular issues…”
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