A thought just occurred to me.

Has anyone seen the Taxables lately?

You remember them; no not that nice couple who you used to act for and do their tax returns before things turned nasty with that unforeseen stamp duty land tax liability.

No ‘the Taxables’ – the CIOT’s family remember: mum, dad (Heather and David to their friends) and their kids, Jack and Penny.

I haven’t seen them for ages; they picked up the Tax Personality of the Year award at the Taxation Awards in 2008, and Heather and David were at a CIOT event later that year (I wonder how much they got paid for that?), but it seems to have gone a bit quiet since then.

Maybe David’s construction business has been hit by the recession and it was reported that Heather was worried about tax credits (let’s hope she’d not been overclaiming).

Penny was supposed to be setting up a web-design company, but maybe she’d had difficulty getting a bank loan since things went south on that front and Jack?

Last I heard about Jack, he was messing around on Facebook. I wonder if his dad told him to go and get a proper job?

But that still doesn’t solve the problem of their whereabouts.

Then I suddenly saw the Conservatives election campaign being ‘kicked off’ by two giant boots. The toe of the right one says ‘Jobs Tax’, while the left says ‘More debt’.

I did see a photo of the boots ‘in real life’ – they were presumably made of polystyrene and there seemed to be someone inside each one – wearing masks of Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling – so they could trot off down the road scaring the voters.

I suddenly started to wonder if it was a couple of the Taxables in disguise – still I’m sure that they will be declaring the income; do you think they’re employed or self-employed?

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