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

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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. You will be able to afford to employ an accountant, who, with their well-honed tricks, will funnel your money away from the state and back into your pocket (minus a sizeable sum for themselves). If you sign into Viva Engage via Microsoft 365, select View and update your profile in Office Delve to change your profile. The author’s nom de plume – The Rebel Accountant – allows him to give a highly personalised tell-all account of his career, always irreverent and by turns shocking and funny.

In Taxopia a rogue accountant breaks ranks to share his journey from clueless naif 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. There are enough legal ways for wealthy people to avoid tax anyway without resorting to breaking the law, even if plenty of them skirt pretty close or are downright unethical. If you’re given a choice of earning a fortune at a Big Four firm, or taking less money to go to HMRC where there are budget cuts, what are you going to pick? I would very much recommend reading Taxtopia because it's the most hilarious book about tax I've ever read! Still, he underlines there are still plenty of simpler and wholly legal ways for the wealthy to get around it.Three million firms are registered at Companies House – and it’s never investigated whether their information is correct or not. There’s no mullet, ripped jeans or leather jacket; our bespectacled “rebel” is wearing a plain fleece over an ordinary shirt. A shocking, enraging, sometimes hilarious expose of a tax system that lives down to all our worst fears of further enriching the wealthy at the expense of the little guys. And this month Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor, said in his spring Budget that he aims to create “a new criminal offence for promoters of tax avoidance” and wants those involved to be disqualified as company directors faster.

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! But these pages brought one reveal after another, along with the laughs, across the whole tax landscape. of VAT on that was lawfully avoided by setting up a series of interlinked holding companies in tax havens. To not just combat tax dodging, but wipe out the tax unfairness that aids it, perhaps the Rebel Accountant is onto something.The Government can pass as many laws as they want – but if agencies don’t enforce them, then it doesn’t matter,” he adds. While reports of celebrities avoiding taxes can be galling, it’s more alarming when politicians are caught doing it. Big corporations like Starbucks move artificial royalty payments around within their own empire because royalties are tax deductible in some tax jurisdictions but not others.

If you say ‘cut taxes on business’, instinctively people think you must be some weird neocon,” he says, “but if you’re simultaneously raising taxes on rich people, where does that leave you? If you believe in social justice and fairness, we definitely don’t have a tax system set up for it,” he argues – but it goes beyond that. The rich-poor stuff is sometimes more rhetoric than rounded analysis, but it does tee up the rebel’s final chapter: the Taxtopia solution.The man himself however couldn’t resist plastering images of ‘my jet’ all over his social media, helping to trigger a ‘Paradise Papers’ expose in the Guardian. That’s why there are around 30,000 tax advisers, and about 100,000 people working in tax altogether.