to be a bit pissed off that Gary Barlow has been involved in tax avoidance?

[grovel]

I thought he was supposed to be a national treasure?

From The Mirror:

Gary Barlow and two other Take That stars face having to pay back tens of millions of pounds in tax after a court ruled they were part of a massive tax avoidance scheme.

The singer-songwriter, Howard Donald, Mark Owen and manager Jonathan Wild poured £66million into two partnerships styled as music-industry investment schemes.

But the ventures were artificial tax shelters for the super-rich which allowed the musicians to avoid tax on about £63million from world tours and CD sales.

The Take That members are likely to be ordered to repay more than £20million to HM Revenue & Customs.

Tax judge Colin Bishopp rejected arguments that more than 50 partnerships, set up by a company called Icebreaker Management, had been set up for commercial purposes.

He said: “Icebreaker is, and was known and understood by all concerned to be, a tax avoidance scheme.

“The aim was to secure [tax] relief for members, and to inflate the scale of the relief by unnecessary borrowing.”

Yes this pisses me off when mega rich people do this. I'm taxed a large amount on not so large salary and so are many others in Britain. Make rich people pay their taxes and stop handouts to the last lot that don't want to work. Then the hard working people of Britain may not have to be taxed so much. Rant over sorry

Lazy*

"National treasure"?

He's boring as fuck and now it turns out he's tight-fisted to boot.

Don't worry, HMRC will soon be able to access your bank account so there will be no getting away with not paying as much tax as the government says you must pay.

When it comes to ethics perhaps he sets the Bar low.

Gary Barlow and Chris Moyles both climbed Killimanjaro in 2008 to raise funds for Comic Relief. This, as we all no doubt recall received massive media coverage and they were lauded as being heroes. In the meantime, Chris Moyles was allegedly involved in a scheme where he claimed to be a second hand car salesman, in order to limit his tax liability and GB was involved in the scheme which has been deemed to be an avoidance scheme. The cult of celebrity sucks.

On the whole once someone has an income or assets above a certain level where they pay tax and how much they pay is essentially a voluntary decision.

Its a difficult moral area but in creative industries where there are no physical goods produced and businesses have no physical location then tax systems simply cannot hope to capture tax on them.

Even businesses with physical locations and physical products now routinely hold their brands in offshore tax havens and pay licence fees and royalties there so there is no tax on them.

I used to work in a business that transacted billions of dollars every year. I sat in London and the contracts went via Switzerland all perfectly legally. Tax and NI was paid by my employer on my salary in the UK as well as business rates on our office building but no tax on profits on the business which made many millions each year.

you believe everything you read in The Mirror

samsam, Google "Gary Barlow Tax".

And then come back and tell me I've got the story wrong.

I like this

Elizabeth Warren quote

DH and I had a very heated argument about this. I think if you don't want to pay into the system you have no business relying on any public sector worker, directly or indirectly - which is obviously impossible. Barlow is in the same camp
as Chris Car dealer Moyles. Charity work means fuck all when you're sneaking out of paying tax.

He could do a Cliff Richards and emigrate to Barbados and renounce citizenship. Though Cliff might not just be avoiding tax. Who knows.

YABU he's only acting in his own best interest.

But he does pay into the system Sauce.

He might not pay millions, but he certainly pays some. Just like most people.

He doesn't pay what he should otherwise the judge wouldn't be demanding more.

If a wealthy person pay £1 million of tax in any given year she/he is paying for the entire cost they imposed on the UK in terms of healthcare and education for their whole life.

If they pay VAT and other consumption taxes and business rates and domestic rates as well as NI and income tax on their employees salaries they are paying a huge amount per year.

One system that some countries adopt is to have a ceiling on total tax each year so that no matter how much you earn or assets you own then you only pay up to the maximum limit and then no more.

Is this issue a worldwide problem?

Question was to Man really

Sauce - if he pays what is now requested then he will be paying what he owes.

With PAYE it is very transparent what you should be paying.

Once you're out of that system it becomes harder. Small time landlords or self-employed people for example might put expenses through that they feel are legitimate to avoid paying more tax than necessary. HMRC may dispute that. They may end up paying extra.

GB has done nothing more than a higher-profile, higher-reward bit perhaps higher-risk version of this. If has just ended with a judge saying HMRC are right not the tax accountants.

I'd say he is less deserving of our contempt (for this - who knows about his other tax affairs) than the many tradesmen who do jobs cash in hand to brazenly evade tax. But most people won't criticise them because they're unknown and not millionaires.

Yes its a worldwide problem.

The issue is that all Governments including our own are heavily conflicted. The preferential non-dom tax rate in the UK is a prime example.

All Governments want to attract wealthy internationally mobile people and businesses to their jurisdictions. Therefore they give tax breaks. The lower the taxes the more international people and businesses will be attracted. That means all Government end up in competition with each other. They all say they want to prevent tax avoidance but then also want to collect taxes and attract more people to invest and work in their country to increase the size of their economy.

The net result is wealthy internationally mobile people and businesses can just move around between jurisdictions avoiding taxes quite legally because countries will not and indeed cannot cooperate on this issue. Indeed many Governments actively encourage and approach these types of people with special incentives in the hope they will move their income and assets to their jurisdiction.

I knew that I would get a complicated answer!

Evertonmint it's all relative though. The tradesman is probably struggling to pay his mortgage whereas GB has millions in the bank.

So tax evasion is fine if you don't have much money but tax avoidance isn't fine if you're rich? Really?

That's like saying drunk driving is ok if you're poor but being a bit drunk in public even if you're not driving when you're rich is much worse.

One is illegal, one isn't. The amount of money someone has doesn't come into it.

Joni - are you really truly saying it's ok for people to break the law if they don't have much money? Really? I'm actually gobsmacked!

The rich do pay a lot of tax, if a lot of 'rich' people that some complain about stopped earning that income and therefore reducing the ability to pay in substantially more in one year than most in a lifetime there would be seriusly reduced revenues available to pay for services we all access.

People seem to forget that the so called rich people actually work hard to earn that money in the first place. I am not saying people who earn less work any less hard just that they work hard.

man yep dont even go there on dual contracts and whether the work was acutally carried out in a nondome residence or not. Like I said much earlier tax is not as straight forward as calculating a percentage. There are many what if's to apply in varied circumstances.

'People seem to forget that the so called rich people actually work hard to earn that money in the first place.'

That's like saying low earners are poor because they don't work hard enough. Not all rich people are rich because they work so very hard.