Want advice from UK government website about tax 'n' stuff? Talk to the chatbot From the department of "this will go well" comes confirmation UK government is trialling an experimental chatbot with 15,000 business users, who can use it to ask questions about tax and available support. At present, the chatbot, which is a tool built using OpenAI's GPT-4 technology, has been linked to 30 gov.uk business …
This has been one of my arguments and annoyances for years. Tax law should be extremely simple and be no more than a few pages. You earn x you pay y. Your company earns x it pays y. No exceptions such as paying fees to a subsidiary in another country to use the name. No offsetting your personal tax on artwork depreciation or any depreciation. You lost money on it then tough shit. You want to off shore money. No problem but before that transaction goes through I hope you can prove you paid tax on it.
The reason no political party has ever really tried to deal with it is because nearly every political party and politician uses the same tax loopholes themselves. The same can also be said of tenants rights. Asking landlords to vote on tenant rights is like asking cats to criminalise knocking random stuff off tables (best analogy I could come up with).
So your local petrol station sells for £1.35/litre. It pays £1.25/litre to Esso for the petrol. Does it pay 25% on £1.35 income or 25% on (£1.35-£1.25) = 10p profit ?
The Hermes store on Oxford St sells a handbag for £5000, it pays Hermes-France £4999 for the bag. So it pays 25% of £1 .
You could have a tax law which says - don't take the piss you rich thieving bastard (only in Latin) but that's why the tax law isn't written on a Post-It
Exactly, because the alternative is that you have import/export tariffs on _everything_ (products _and_ services). How can the tax law determine whether the money being sent abroad is a legitimate transaction or one to avoid paying tax in the country? Microsoft sell software/services in this country, but very little of the "cost" of that comes from the work undertaken in this country. (Yes, I know they should be paying more than they do, but how do you describe that legally).
Not to mention there are certain parts of the tax law that are historic (so you'd need to review and potentially vote on each piece to work out whether it's still necessary) and there are some that are there because taxes (or lack of) are designed to discourage (or encourage) certain behaviours. For example we have [S]EIS that is meant to encourage investment in small risky startups. We have gift aid that is meant to encourage donating to charity. Even pensions are a tax "workaround" so do you want to abolish those as well in your simple tax regime?
You make a very good point actually which is where we I think should start looking at revenue as an indicator of tax burden. The way I see it and I might be completely wrong here but if you are selling 10,000 £5000 Hermes bags that's a revenue of 50,000,000 and a profit of 10,000. Clearly something is wrong with this calculation. Therefore for a business to operate it must have a minimum profit to revenue percentage ratio. That would put an end to the shifting of profits in this way.
You've not made any profit because you have to pay people and the minimum wage in the UK is about £24k a year. You'd have to sell 14 bags an hour just to cover the wages of one employee. And what about that Oxford St shop? Where's the rent and rates coming from. It's obvious to anyone that there's something wrong with this business and it should be investigated for some kind of fraud.
It will be the same experience as all the useless chatbots set up by companies like my energy and phone suppliers have implemented : unnecessary for simple queries, because you can just get the answers quickly by reading the FAQ page on their website, and completely unable to help with anything more complex because it's not been trained on anything other than their website.
I'm sure everybody frustrated by having to wait hours to get through to HMRC on the phone will be thrilled that the money has been spent on this crap rather than employing more trained staff to help them more quickly : like the waste of time customer service bots, the most common question is likely to be "how can I talk to a human who can answer the questions that you can't answer?"
About a dozen years ago I had some concerns about my (paper) tax return due to having just gone freelance and got a share option payout from my old company a year after I'd left. In those days there was a tax office in the town and as I was passing it one day I went in. There was a woman on what I thought was reception, so I asked if I could make an appointment to talk to someone about filling in my tax return. "What's the problem" she asked. I explained it, she asked me a few questions and told me what to do. She wrote down the refs on the tax form for me on the back of her card - she was one of the tax inspectors. She told me I could come back and she, or whoever was on the desk, would check it for me before I submitted it. Gobsmacking service. Of course, that office is long closed, but my tax is much simpler now and the HMRC online filing service seems pretty good for my needs but if you need advice it's plain wrong that you have to wait hours for someone on the phone.
when I was young and hopeless about tax, I went to a appropriately gloom tax office (1930s industrial-style architecture), waited less than 30 min, if I remember correctly, under dim, buzzing glow-tubes and then walked up to a school-type desk in the big room, one of many such school-type desks in that room with usually two humans by the desk facing each other and apparently engaged in some sort of interaction. And then I had my, rather trivial, problem reasonably patiently explained by a human employee of the HMRC. Actually, despite a shabby format of that place, the experience felt quite.. reassuring. Like a meeting with an abstract concept of 'the state', only face-to-face. That was not so long ago, only in... around 1995, omg.
Obviously with virtual assistants we're now only half-way there, it shouldn't be too difficult to merge plastic shell with a chip, remember the job centre in that movie, elysium, eh. The future's bright, the future's... well, not orange, but a merger between three and vodafone, cause it is good for competition and consumers.
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