CORPORATE TAXES

Tom Aston on the bank levy rate increase

Malcolm White, HMRC Policy Adviser, and leading private sector professionals Tom Aston, Helen Buchanan and Andrew Senior took part in a roundtable discussion on the Bank Levy

David Cameron is planning ‘the biggest and crudest corporate tax cut in living memory’ and the banks will be the main beneficiaries, the Guardian columnist George Monbiot claimed yesterday, in a comment piece that has already attracted more than 1,000 comments on the newspaper's website.

HMRC is to ‘consider and test’ alternative ways of resolving tax disputes with SMEs, with a view to reducing the impact of ‘avoidable’ disputes.

‘Wild allegations’ have been made against HMRC for which ‘there is little or no evidence’, David Gauke said yesterday after a Conservative MP said there was a lot of public disquiet about ‘alleged enormous sweetheart deals done with major public companies’.

‘“UK Uncut worries people like me,” says a multinational executive. “It shows how much raw anger there is out there.

George Osborne has announced an increase in the rate of the bank levy for 2011, having decided that the reduced rate set to recognise ‘uncertain market conditions’ is no longer necessary.

The patent box, the government’s proposed preferential regime for profits arising from patents, will cost over £1 billion a year in lost revenue but will benefit only ‘a handful of firms’ according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

There is ‘little transparency’ for the taxpayer over the way that tax disputes with large companies are resolved, the Commons Public Accounts Committee said as it reported that HMRC had not answered some of its specific questions because of taxpayer...

R&D tax relief: recent developments