Tim Worstall

The feature that auto-corrects text as you type.
Every accountant I know has gone into the options screen and entered in that typo so that it automatically changes back to ‘accountant’ and spares their blushes.
No, that’s just the set up.
Occasionally you come across a few howlers in the field. Such as this [...]

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As you do under these circumstances, I then learned the whole chart off by heart, right down to the letters that were only a couple of millimetres high, by dint of leaving my right eye slightly open. A couple of days later the doctor told me that my eyesight appeared to have recovered, at which [...]

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UK forensic accountant Richard Murphy says: “The fundamental question is how accountants got away with changing rules of accountancy, which state they don’t have to assess the valuation of assets underlying the assets on a balance sheet. How did they get away with changing the audit rules?”
I can see two possible statements here.
1) That accountants, [...]

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It’s amazing that an accounting Professor gets this so wrong.
The fledgling economic recovery requires that more spending power be placed in the hands of normal people and small businesses. All political parties should look at the operations of the insolvency industry, which is enriching itself at the expense of normal people.
The point of an insolvency, [...]

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In general, an individual cannot receive tax relief on interest payments whether the debt is for buying a house, car, fridge, cooker or anything else. In contrast, the tax concessions to corporations have been maintained regardless of whether the debt is for buying productive assets, or speculating in markets, paying exorbitant dividends, setting up operations [...]

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Can anyone explain the logic of this second sentence to me?
And the reality is that tax yield is based on the combination of tax base and tax rate. You can control one of those two at any time, but not both at once.
I’m pretty sure that the UK can determine both what are corporate profits [...]

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The Sunday Times investigates Google’s tax arrangements in the UK. Well, actually, they have Richard Murphy read the accounts for them.
In a nutshell when you buy an ad from Google you do so from Google Ireland rather than Google UK. Thus tax on any profits ends up in the Irish Treasury rather than the UK [...]

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Another former senior tax inspector said: "One of the problems the Revenue has is that the company doesn’t have to disclose the amount of tax actually paid in any year and the accounts won’t reveal the liability. Each company has its own method of accounting for tax: there’s no uniform way of declaring it all."

Surely [...]

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Oh, boy, this Grauniad investigation is indeed fun:

International companies based in the UK may have hundreds of subsidiary companies, which many use to take advantage of differing tax regimes as they move goods, services and intellectual property around the world. It is estimated that more than half of world trade consists of such movements (known [...]

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The second would be a state-funded programme to build 100,000 houses a year, which would provide homes for those who need them and create 50,000 jobs in the construction industry.

Is John Cruddas seriously trying to say that each house built requires 6 man months of labour?

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So, we’ve got something called the Serious Fraud Office. They investigate financial crimes.
Very important, of course. Stuffed full of the finest forensic accounting brains our nation can produce. Of course.

Serious Fraud Office asks for £15m to cover ‘urgent’ hole in budget

Mhm, hmm. They cannot even manage their own budget. Fills one with confidence at their [...]

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Read the article then read the first comment.
It’s delightful to see a Professor of Accounting taken apart quite so swiftly.

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But the strangest comment was by BAT, which paid no tax in the UK in 2007:

A spokeswoman for BAT, the twelfth-biggest company in the UK by market value and the owner of the cigarette brands Lucky Strike and Pall Mall, said that its head office operated at a loss and that 99 per cent of [...]

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I’m not an accounting expert, by any means, but I think The Guardian has the wrong end of the stick again here.

More than 50 PFI schemes have now been included in portfolios held in Channel Islands tax havens by three major PFI investment companies, HSBC Infrastructure, 3i Infrastructure and Babcock and Brown Public Partnerships.
Once the [...]

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Look, I think the man has had the odd thing sensible to say, Well, I had:

But the reality is that those who want radical social change that will destroy the concept of walfare(welfare, sic) want to exploit this as an opprtunity to destroy society as we know it.
And I oppose the far Right perception of [...]

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And for all the newspaper furore about the possible loss of some basic pretty data on 25 million people by HM Revenue & Customs I note that,,,

Not many phone about this,
So therefore, it isn’t important. Yes?
So, how many phone in to R. Murphy’s line about tax evasion?
Goose and gander.

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An excellent piece over here.
As is said:

This is a great piece….It’s enough to make me nostalgic for the good old days, when Iain Dale hadn’t even heard of us.

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Everyone’s favourite accountant, Richard Murphy, is at it again. Not seeing the wood for the trees.

Now suppose you have debt of $2 billion on your balance sheet, but your rating goes down because it is perceived that you are a risker organisation. The price people will now pay for your debt (and remember, debt is [...]

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