Forum - The Budget 2011 - what are you hoping for?

Continued investment in business training to help start-ups please Mr Osborne - there is a huge gap in knowledge amongst small business owners.

I'm one and there's loads I don't know, and even more that I don't even realise I don't know!

Funded training to fill the gaps would be a big boost for small businesses and entrepreneurs.

The Budget approaches and we hear talk of:

* National Insurance and Income Tax to be merged

* changes to IR35 to simplify it

* HMRC paying compensation to tax payers for incorrectly demanding underpaid tax

* HMRC claiming that they are overworked

It’s surely time to shout – STOP RIGHT NOW

Aren’t we just tinkering around the edges of these outdated, archaic systems of taxation first introduced decades and centuries ago, administrated by an organisation that has merged, centralised, with IT system that often create more problems than they solve!

Both the business world and the job world are VERY different to 5 years ago, 10 years ago –let alone the time when the various systems of taxation were introduced.

* Many are turning to self employment or small limited companies as a result of the encouragement of entrepreneurship, job losses, or the need to generate second incomes given high inflation

1,000 new limited companies are registered every day!

* Jobs are no longer for life – seeing the frequent movement of employees between jobs

* Many have multiple streams of income e.g. several pensions, two or more jobs, rental incomes, taxable benefits etc

* The knowledge of the taxation system by staff at HMRC seems to decrease annually

Tax – It’s just like a house

If you keep adding bits to a house, in different architectures and of different time periods, what may have started out as a beautiful period property will eventually look alike a carbuncle.

The time will come for the ugly carbuncle to be knocked down and a beautiful new property put in its place incorporating those things of beautify from the original and also recognising the needs of modern living.

So stop

* merging this tax with that tax (income tax and national insurance)

* simplifying rules that can’t be made to work in the first place (IR35 and income shifting)

* operate a system to collect tax from income that doesn’t work for multiple income stream until an annual reconciliation carried out three years after the fact (PAYE)

Start Again – with a clean piece of paper

Forget what we have.

What do we need for now and the future – because it certainly is not what we have is it!