Confidentiality, Tax Avoidance And Evasion
Dennis Healy, when he was the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, once said that "the difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison wall." What he meant was that there is a fine line between tax evasion, which is illegal, and tax avoidance which might be frowned upon but is legal. Put another way, if someone gets married and the unplanned consequence is that tax is saved that is lucky. If that person gets married and the main reason is to save tax, it is tax avoidance. If that person tells the tax authorities that they are married when they are not in order to save tax it is tax evasion.
Governments all around the world, including China, need to find more money and are under great pressure to collect more tax. Tax departments are becoming more sophisticated and better at catching tax cheats. Many are mounting concerted campaigns to convince the public that tax avoidance is illegal and immoral. It is not the former but is arguably the latter. The public relations war is being lost by wealthy tax payers. The vast majority of the population is paid a straight-forward wage and has little or no opportunity to reduce their taxes.. Even if there were tax saving possibilities it is likely that the fees they would pay to properly implement any kind of tax planning would be more than the tax saving. It is hardly surprising, then, that the majority do not like the idea that the wealthy minority employ professional advisors to reduce their taxes or simply hide their money, fail to declare taxable income and illegally evade tax.
As professional advisors, we clearly see nothing wrong in engaging in legitimate tax mitigation. That is not necessarily a view which the majority will agree with. Frequently we find it necessary to point out to those who judge tax saving to be immoral that it is also possible for us to advise them how to pay more tax if they feel that any sort of tax saving is wrong. Rarely is that offer taken up.
There is a worldwide effort being made to prevent tax evasion. Swiss banks are now being forced to offer up details of clients so that their home tax authorities can check that the capital in their accounts has had tax paid upon it and that the revenue generated on the capital sum is also being taxed correctly. In many cases it appears that this is not the case and that some naughty people have been using Swiss bank secrecy to assist their efforts to evade tax by failing to declare correctly on their tax...
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