TAXTOPIA: How I Discovered the Injustices, Scams and Guilty Secrets of the Tax Evasion Game

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The book is enormously readable … I would very much recommend reading Taxtopia because it’s the most hilarious book about tax I’ve ever read!’–Siân Pattenden, The Bunker You’ve chosen TAXOPIA LITE, a self-lodgment service. Please be aware that tax offices are starting to phase-out DIY paper lodgments and are encouraging the transition to digital. Outright tax evasion, when someone knowingly breaks the rules, is the most serious. It’s criminal – but court cases are relatively rare. Only 336 individuals were charged in the most recent annual figures. An anonymous accountant provides an eye-opening expose of the dubious tax practices of the super-rich and the broken global tax system

The book is enormously readable ... I would very much recommend reading Taxtopia because it's the most hilarious book about tax I've ever read!' - Si n Pattenden, The Bunker Monoray has bagged the rights to a "highly entertaining" book about tax in a six-way auction from anonymous author ‘The Rebel Accountant’. Taxtopia takes the lid off the secret world of tax avoidance and reveals just how tax advisers have enabled their big wealthy clients to mitigate, minimise, or escape entirely the tax obligations that bind us little people. The technical stuff is often in chatty footnotes full of jokes, while the narrative lays bare the absurd and unjust complexities of a tax system designed by accountants, he says, to keep them in work. Most clients of the top firms have cash in illegal accounts, which the firm ‘doesn’t know about’. Or rather it does, but it just asks the client not to tell them about it…. so it ‘doesn’t know’. Though he insists that he has never “personally done anything illegal, or even perhaps unethical”, he knows of many others who have. He wanted to remain anonymous so he could freely reveal the “cheats and scandals, sex and violence, conflict and lies” involved in dodging tax, he writes in his book.Finally we get an analysis of Universal Credit, lambasting the fact that someone on UC who gets a job loses 55% of his benefit, so is effectively paying a 55% tax rate, while a millionaire accountancy partner is paying a 51% rate. The Taxtopia Solution

Let’s be honest: this vastly simplified tax regime is almost certainly never, ever going to be introduced. But is that because it’s a bad set of ideas? Or because the rich and powerful would simply never stand for it – while the rest of us are too used to the way things are? When Jimmy Carr was revealed in 2012 to be using the K2 scheme – whereby his income was paid directly into a Jersey-based trust, which then loaned him money he never had to repay – he apologised but explained: “I met with a financial adviser and he said to me: ‘Do you want to pay less tax? It’s totally legal.’ I said: ‘Yes’.” But nothing happened – “Ernst & Young’s profits went up and Lewis was knighted by the Queen”. That’s because when HM Treasury investigated the Isle of Man leasing company, it found no evidence of VAT fraud as it had was only doing what countless other UHNW (ultra high net worth) individuals are doing all over the world right now – just look at how difficult it has been for Western nations to seize the yachts of sanctioned Russian oligarchs”. Ah yes, those devious accountants. They usually manage to slip away without any of us learning their names, even if all the celebrities blame them.That’s much cheerier! I think everyone hopes the future will be a more utopian place, it just happens that the world I know best is the world of tax. In a Taxtopia we’d have a system that worked for everybody: that was pro-business and supported the poor, that helped save the environment and redistributed wealth and couldn’t be avoided by paying an accountant to rearrange your finances. It wouldn’t be hard to do, though it would mean I’d be out of a job. A hilarious and deeply troubling expose about how the world's shady tax system is exploited and proves what we always suspected - that our tax system is rigged against us. Read it and weep.' - Geraint Anderson author of City Boy If you have ever paid an accountant, they have charged you what they think they can get away with, not what the work is worth. Always complain about your fee.” Perhaps one of the best people to ask about this calls himself the Rebel Accountant. A chartered tax adviser based in London, he has anonymously written a new book, Taxtopia, which explains precisely how the UK’s system is “rigged” in favour of the wealthiest and reveals the methods – sometimes simple, sometimes clever, often outrageous – they can use to take advantage. Aggressive tax avoidance, on the other hand, is when someone complies with the letter of the law but aims to “ subvert its purpose”.

In the topsy-turvy world of tax avoidance, you can get richer by buying a yacht, the world's biggest exporter of coffee is Switzerland, and billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump and the Duke of Westminster often pay less tax than you do. In TAXTOPIA a rogue accountant breaks ranks to share his journey from clueless na f to skilled tax consultant -and in doing so blows the lid on the murky world of making the tax burdens of the ultra-wealthy disappear. To not just combat tax dodging, but wipe out the tax unfairness that aids it, perhaps the Rebel Accountant is onto something.

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Taxtopia’s anonymous author has done the impossible – created a hilarious and deeply troubling expose about how the world’s shady tax system is exploited and proves what we always suspected – that our tax system is rigged against us. Read it and weep.’– Geraint Anderson author of City Boy

Taxtopia's anonymous author has done the impossible - created a hilarious and deeply troubling expose about how the world's shady tax system is exploited and proves what we always suspected - that our tax system is rigged against us. Read it and weep.' - Geraint Anderson author of City Boy But discussion of an important tax conundrum for the humble self-employed at home – whether to be a sole trader or a company – was a tad brief. I wanted him to note that tax and dividend rate changes can affect the equation, and that companies are more useful to traders with spouses. The synopsis for his début title reads: “The Rebel Accountant has broken ranks to share his journey from clueless naïf to skilled tax consultant and in doing so blows the lid off the murky world of making the tax burdens of the ultra-wealthy disappear. In the topsy-turvy world of tax avoidance, you can get richer by buying a yacht, the world’s biggest exporter of coffee is Switzerland, and billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump and the Duke of Westminster often pay less tax than you do. Excludes asset finance schedule reconciliations above 4 (i.e.up to 4 asset finance schedules are included) It’s beautifully simple, and we don’t get to hear the downsides or difficulties, but that can be forgiven. We also don’t get to know what happened to our hero. I’d like to think he was out there still rebelling, perhaps advising the good guys.

One of the hardest hits in the book stems from our rebel’s experience of a tax fixer in Australia who used transfer pricing for Papua New Guinean timber. He writes: Moyles admitted he’d made a “mistake”, but insisted he’d simply “acted on advice I was given” to use a scheme which he’d been “assured was legal”. Barlow similarly apologised and said he’d since appointed “a new team of accountants”. Effectively the richer you are the more you get to decide whether you’d rather pay tax or give to charity (or in some cases neither).” The Rebel Accountant said: “I’ve written a book about tax that explains how it works and how you’re screwed over by it and what you can do about that screwing, written in a way that hopefully disguises the fact that you’re reading a book about tax at all. This was the challenge I set myself— to overcome the problem that everyone needs to read a book about tax but no one wants to. I hope that changes now.”