Key points
- Purportedly retrospective legislation should be introduced by the government only if necessary.
- The loan charge rules show that retrospection can have bad consequences.
- Retrospective law must have proper parliamentary scrutiny.
- Proposed safeguards on warnings schemes secondary liabilities time limits and rights of appeal.
- Legislation that does not meet safeguards should be suspended until it is made compliant.
In a written statement on 31 October 2019 announcing a proposal for a retrospective tax law relating to HMRC’s use of automated processes to serve notices (tinyurl.com/y5wlg2ox) the then financial secretary to the Treasury Jesse Norman declared that the UK government was ‘committed to doing what is necessary to protect the exchequer maintain fairness in the tax system and give certainty to taxpayers’. The retrospective nature of the proposal must have been on his mind in reaching this conclusion since he was also...
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