This week's opinion

I have enjoyed reading the latest Office of Tax Simplification (OTS) first report on inheritance tax.

One of the things that caught my eye was the graph on page five showing the effective rate of tax payable on estates of varying size. It peaks at about 20% with estates worth £6m and then tails away to roughly 10% for estates worth more than £10m. How does that tie in with the public perception that on death the ‘taxman’ will take 40% of your estate in particular when 26% of people think that more than 20% of estates paid inheritance tax?

As practitioners we are used to thinking about the actual rates of tax but it can be very difficult to persuade people that looking at headline rates does not give the full picture. This seems to lead in the case of...