This week's opinion

Most readers will have prepared tax computations at some point in their careers. Many of those computations will have had only a few adjustments – perhaps little more than adding back depreciation and deducting capital allowances. For large companies the adjustments might spread over several pages. But have you ever wondered what is the maximum number of computational adjustments?

I was prompted to think about this by the recent Office of Tax Simplification (OTS) discussion paper on reforming the corporation tax computation (see below). It was accompanied by a spreadsheet listing all the potential adjustments that the OTS had found in the tax system. The spreadsheet has four pages and about 80 items. This was about what I expected but perhaps a bit on the low side. Then I realised I had clicked on the summary table. The complete version runs to 21 pages. Mercifully the OTS...