Tag: Facts

Why have we made UK Tax so complicated!

Here are the facts:

  • 6,102 pages of legislation (according to Tolleys in 2012)
  • 639 monetary values
  • 425 thresholds
  • 214 penalties

Click to access OTS_Focus_paper_on_complexity_final.pdf

The Office of Tax Simplication have been working on ways to simply things since 2010 but it seems to me every time we change things we just create more rules!

How will tax payers be able to cope with Making Tax Digital and the introduction of Quarterly and eventually Monthly reporting!

steve@bicknells.net

10 crazy Christmas accounting facts

Been Naughty?

It’s nearly Christmas, but did you know….

  1. While millions of people are exchanging presents, feasting on turkey, and nodding off in front of the television, 1,600 people are expected to take time out from the yuletide festivities and do their tax return online
  2. If your employer spent more than £150 per head on parties you could be facing a tax bill in the new year
  3. If you are given third party gifts (suppliers) worth more than £250, then you could he taxed on them
  4. An employer may provide employees with a seasonal gift, such as a turkey, an ordinary bottle of wine or a box of chocolates at Christmas. All of these gifts can be treated as trivial benefits.
  5. Shoppers spent £1.2bn on ‘Panic Saturday’ (20th December 2014)
  6. Christmas Shoppers will spend £74bn in 2014 and of this £17.4bn will be spent online
  7. From 2016, employers will be able to give employees tax-free “benefits” – not cash – of up to £50 a year.
  8. HMRC will not be holding any Christmas Parties for its staff according to the Telegraph
  9. Many people think Scrooge was an accountant but he was actually a moneylender
  10. There is no VAT on purchased gift vouchers as they are treated as cash equivalents, its only when they are used to purchase items that VAT needs to be accounted for.

Have a great Christmas

steve@bicknells.net

10 surprising accountancy facts

Looking at phone

Here are some surprising, strange and unusual facts about accountancy…

  1. Franciscan friar Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli is known has the father of accounting, although double entry had been around for centuries, he was the first to write a book on it (27 pages).
  2. It was FBI accountants that brought down Al Capone in 1931, FBI now employees 1,400 Accountants as Special Agents
  3. Mick Jagger and  Janet Jackson trained as accountants before becoming singers
  4. 60% of taxpayer hire an accountant to help them do their tax returns
  5. Bookkeeper and Bookkeeping are the only word in the English Language to have 3 consecutive double letters
  6. Monty Python frequently poked fun at the accounting profession.  One possible reason for their targeting of the accounting profession is that John Cleese’s father wanted him to become an accountant.  He was to work for Grace, Derbyshire and Todd Chartered Accountants on Whiteladies Rd, Bristol. (strange accounting facts)
  7. J. P. Morgan got his first Wall Street job as a junior accountant. Five years later he founded his own company.
  8. Erin Brady who won Miss USA 2013 is an accountant.
  9. St Matthew the Evangelist, author of the first of the Gospels, is the patron saint of accountants.  He is also the patron saint of tax collectors, bookkeepers, stock brokers and bankers.
  10. Compter was the original word of accounting. It was a derived from a French language.

steve@bicknells.net