Richard Murphy’s Fair Tax Campaign is now dismissing genuine incentives such as the new Patent Box as being “state-sanctioned tax avoidance“.
Excuse me? What exactly does “state-sanctioned tax avoidance” mean? Fair Tax Campaign’s own definition of tax avoidance is “seeking to minimise a tax bill without deliberate deception (which would be tax evasion) but in a way that is contrary to the spirit of the law.“
So, my question to the Fair Tax Campaign is quite simple, if it’s “state-sanctioned”, how can it possibly be “contrary to the spirit of the law”?