My career in tax has spanned almost 20 years now, and I recently had cause to reflect on how the profession has changed in the public eye. It really is rather alarming, and a lot of that change has been caused by two things in my opinion: greed and propaganda.
When I started out my career in 2000 I recall the awkward silence one experienced when being asked the question "and what do you do?". Any response almost always seemed to include statements along the lines of "but, I don't work for the Revenue" (not that there's anything wrong with that you understand), or "no, I'm one of the good guys, we save you tax", at which point everyone would usually start breathing again and ask a few interested questions.
Fast forward to 2018, and the mention that you "work in tax" tends to elicit that we are somehow responsible for all the tax schemes, avoidance, and evasion that has ever existed and very possibly we're the cause of the latest natural catastrophy! Oh well, at least we're not bankers...
So, you can see what I mean by the turnaround in public opinion in the last 20 years. Why has this happened though? Well, we really weren't helped by the sheer number of tax schemes that were put in place during this time by everyone from perfectly scrupulous advisers to some who had even less actual knowledge of tax than their clients (yes, some parts of the tax world became like 1970's insurance salesmen).
However, despite the media shenanigans that has now largely changed. For those of us who are professionally qualified and subscribe to our professional body we are (as we always have been) bound by certain professional rules, ethics and guidelines. Those were beefed up in recent years to cover the topic of “tax avoidance” at the behest of the Treasury, and most of the tax and accounting bodies in the UK now adhere to something called PCRT (Professional Conduct in Relation to Taxation).
So, lets hope in the coming years that the media will catch up with reality and realise that tax isn’t the Wild West. Yes, there will always be unregulated providers out there, but that is the same with many things. You wouldn’t get an unregistered plumber to replace your boiler, so why would you get an unregulated tax adviser to do your tax planning? Just think on that...
However, despite the media shenanigans that has now largely changed. For those of us who are professionally qualified and subscribe to our professional body we are (as we always have been) bound by certain professional rules, ethics and guidelines. Those were beefed up in recent years to cover the topic of “tax avoidance” at the behest of the Treasury, and most of the tax and accounting bodies in the UK now adhere to something called PCRT (Professional Conduct in Relation to Taxation).
So, lets hope in the coming years that the media will catch up with reality and realise that tax isn’t the Wild West. Yes, there will always be unregulated providers out there, but that is the same with many things. You wouldn’t get an unregistered plumber to replace your boiler, so why would you get an unregulated tax adviser to do your tax planning? Just think on that...
