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The Tax Law Rewrite project is to be closed down next year, after 14 years in operation, HMRC have announced.
The scheme was launched in 1996 by then chancellor Kenneth Clarke, who remarked that his plan was ‘as ambitious as translating the whole of War and Peace into lucid Swahili’.
The project’s aim has been to make tax legislation clearer and easier for taxpayers to understand, and it has succeeded in producing new versions of
- Capital Allowances Act 2001,
- Income Tax (Earnings and Pensions) Act 2003,
- Income Tax (Trading and Other Income) Act 2005,
- Income Tax Act 2007,
- Corporation Tax Act 2009, and
- PAYE Regulations.
The scheme’s final work, expected to be enacted next spring, will be a second Corporation Tax Bill and the Taxation (International and Other Provisions) Bill, which revamps provisions that deal mainly with international tax issues.
The financial secretary to the Treasury, Stephen Timms, remarked that the Tax Law Rewrite project ‘has played a key role in modernising our tax legislation’ which is now ‘far more accessible and easier to apply than the legislation that went before’.
HMRC acknowledged the work of the ‘many tax professionals in the private sector have given their time and expertise in reviewing and improving the new provisions during their development,’ while John Whiting of the Chartered Institute of Taxation said that the rewrite project has ‘achieved much’.
‘However… the CIOT feels it is time to stop the process and focus on simplifying the tax code in order to make it easier for taxpayers to engage with the Revenue, have certainty and pay the right amount of tax,’ added Mr Whiting.
