Comments on: Will Hutton. Seriously Confused.

By: Latonia Moses

Latonia Moses — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 11:14:26 +0000

hi
q9gt17c3hx688n3c
good luck

By: Matthew

Matthew — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 21:43:35 +0000

“Extraordinarily, inheritance tax is felt to be unfair. There is one good reason for this: more than 70 per cent of the take is paid by people inheriting estates of half a million pounds or less.”

This, and your comment agreeing, is nonsense. 76% in 2003/2004 was paid by estates OVER £0.5 million.

By: Kay Tie

Kay Tie — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 19:51:51 +0000

Deemed domicile for IHT is simple: three years out of the last 20 spent outside the UK. If you want to escape IHT, die abroad after leaving the UK for 3 years.

By: Francis

Francis — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 18:26:51 +0000

Re the Swiss “wealth tax”

Taxes in Switzerland are negotiable if you are wealthy. Its kind of like the way you can ask the cook for a discount for quantity if you buy 10 pizzas instead of 1 pizza and you’re buyinf on a wet monday when the guy isn’t getting much business anyway.

I don’t have all the details – not being either swiss or living there – but I have been told by various people that the wealthy “non-doms” as well as companies and other entities who could potentially up sticks and deprive the Swiss cantons of tax revenue are able to agree in advance how much tax they will pay for the next few years or what the tax rate will be or similar. The big catch in Switzerland is that they will expect to to make that commitment so if you agreed in Jan 1999 to pay 1 million CHF a year for the next 10 years based on your valuable tech stock and options you will either be paying that even if the companies turned titsup.com in 2000 or finding that your swiss hosts are now seizing your possessions and potentially your person until you do make the payment.

By: Monty

Monty — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 16:42:02 +0000

There was a caller on “Any Answers” (BBC Radio 4) yesterday, holding forth about the immorality of inheritance itself. No-one, he exclaimed, should have any rights over their assets after death, they only use it to look after their own offspring.
What shocked me was the breathtaking conviction of his self-righteousness. To a man like him, liberty itself is a social evil, to be stamped out, property rights shouldn’t exist, and dissent should be abolished. Somehow it hadn’t dawned on him that his very freedom to air his obnoxious views on a national network would vanish in the collective utopia he so longs for. It was a perfect exposition of envy, greed, and spite.

By: Mark Wadsworth

Mark Wadsworth — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 13:08:05 +0000

“tricky area”

By: Mark Wadsworth

Mark Wadsworth — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 13:07:47 +0000

Tim, your summary on residence and domicile is as good as anybody else’s, it’s a mighty tricky are.

THe first few letters on each line are still being chopped off, BTW.

By: Martin

Martin — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 11:45:56 +0000

Tim,

Everyone starts off with a domicile of origin, which is the country or state in which your father was domiciled. A domicile of origin can be replaced by a domicile of choice, but this is hard to do: your domicile of origin is difficult to shake off. However, citizenship isn’t as critical to domicile status as you seem to think: there are lots of British citizens who are accepted by HMRC as domiciled abroad, and this includes many who were born here.

What this means is that for income tax and CGT purposes (“deemed domicile” puts the worldwide estates of long- UK resident non-doms into the UK IHT net) there are two classes of UK citizens, broadly speaking the indigenes and immigrants and their children (and possibly grandchildren, too.)

Imagine if a method of reducing UK income tax bills were only available to people all of whose grandparents had been born in the UK. It would be called racist, wouldn’t it?

Tim adds: “there are lots of British citizens who are accepted by HMRC as domiciled abroad, and this includes many who were born here.” That I know: one point I was trying to m,ake is that you can’t have started as UK dom then become non-dom “and still stay in the UK earning”. All these people with non-dom status in The City must have started out as non-doms.