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Dan Neidle Profile picture
Dan Neidle
@DanNeidle
Founder, Tax Policy Associates Ltd. Tax realist. More boring on LinkedIn https://t.co/Cm5n2PhqrD
27 subscribers
Oct 24 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
VAT on financial services = VAT on everyone’s mortgage payments.

Mr Polanski does know that. Doesn’t he? h/t @ChristianJMay
Oct 23 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I am being personally sued for more than £8m by a barrister, Setu Kamal. I believe this is one of the largest English libel claims ever made. Image Mr Kamal objects to a report we published back in February about a firm called Arka Wealth (which appears to have since gone out of business).

We will not be taking it down. Image
Oct 21 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
A "British ISA" was a terrible idea when the Conservatives were thinking about it, and it remains a terrible idea today. Image A really important insight of investment theory is to diversify across countries, and put no more than a small % in the UK.

It's not the role of Government to force people to invest badly.

(This is from a brilliant article by Vanguard ) vanguard.co.uk/professional/v…Image
Oct 20 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Hello, internet. The definition of tax evasion is not "when people I don't like politically do it, it's tax evasion" Image
Image Lots of people pay the wrong amount of tax by accident. I've done it myself.

The result: you pay the tax, plus interest. If you were careless, you often pay penalties. It's not tax evasion. It's not illegal.

But ignorance is no defence - you have to pay the tax.
Oct 20 • 25 tweets • 5 min read
People often ask me "why can't tax avoidance be made illegal"?

It's a good question. I recently tried quite hard to make one of the worst kinds of tax avoidance illegal. I think I got it wrong.

Thread: Imagine it's 2010. I've just invented a tax avoidance scheme.

Sign here, pay me £10k, and I'll throw £100k in a big circle and you can claim you just made a £100k tax loss from films/real estate/R&D/whatever, which you can deduct against your income.

(THIS DOES NOT WORK)
Oct 17 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
This is so dumb

1. There are under 200 billionaires in the UK. If they all sell their houses, the impact on the property market will be *tiny*.

2. But why would they sell? They probably spend only a few months here now. If they become non-resident they’ll spend a bit less. Much media discussion of “will they leave?” badly misunderstands this.

Very wealthy people have multiple houses in multiple countries. “Leaving” would in most cases be a small lifestyle change.

They’re not selling their Mayfair townhouse.
Oct 16 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
The intellectual shallowness of wealth tax proponents is something to behold. The Wealth Tax Commission was a serious undertaking. They published a lengthy paper and *seven* background papers on valuation.

Valuation problems were one of the key reasons the Commission recommended *against* an annual wealth tax. Image
Image
Oct 10 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
Big development on our July storyabout a dodgy tax relief claim by Dundee United and tax firm ZLX.

The club made a huge claim for R&D tax relief which said that 24% of the players' time, and 80% of the chef's time, was spent on "research and development".

Not credible. Image ZLX denied the document had been sent to HMRC (but then why was it prepared and signed?).

Dundee United's FD denied signing it. But his electronic signature was on it.

A report in the Courier has two big developments: thecourier.co.uk/fp/sport/footb…
Oct 9 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
Who benefits from the abolition of stamp duty land tax?

The first answer: people buying very expensive homes. Average saving for someone buying a £10m+ home is £1.7m. Average saving for someone buying a £250k-£500k home is £5k. Image The second, truer, answer: people who currently own very expensive homes.

The evidence is that stamp duty is economically paid by sellers - it reduces property prices.

(I went through the evidence for that here ) taxpolicy.org.uk/2024/06/09/sta…Image
Oct 2 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Lots of people asking about the Government's prospects for recovering the £120m from Barrowman/Mone/their companies

Short answer: I don't know. I'm not an insolvency specialist. No clue how the £120m was paid out to them from PPE Medpro

So I have no technical answer

But... (The background: PPE Medpro itself is in administration, with almost no cash to its name. So no money is coming from it - and the question is whether the Government can pursue the money elsewhere.)
Oct 2 • 20 tweets • 5 min read
Douglas Barrowman and Michelle Mone's company, PPE Medpro, has just been ordered to refund the Government £122m from a PPE contract.

There are two very odd things about PPE Medpro that may affect the odds of the Government ever getting that £122m...

Thread: Image The first odd thing: there two PPE Medpros.

One incorporated in the UK. The other incorporated in the Isle of Man. Both Barrowman-linked companies. Image
Image
Sep 28 • 25 tweets • 6 min read
When Keir Starmer gave a field to his parents, he used a "life interest trust". This meant that, as its value grew from £20k to £300k, it was outside their inheritance tax estate.

How did this work? And was it tax avoidance?

🧵 Image I've been working on the story with @Gabriel_Pogrund and the Sunday Times for some time. Their story is here: thetimes.com/uk/politics/ar…
Sep 25 • 15 tweets • 5 min read
Is Andy Burnham right? Is there "definitely a case" for reintroducing the 50p tax rate? Image The top ("additional") rate was 50p from 2010 to 2013, on income over £150k.

The additional rate was cut to 45p from 2013. Image
Image
Sep 18 • 22 tweets • 9 min read
NEW: Britain’s fiercest libel firm, Carter-Ruck, acted for the $4bn OneCoin fraud and threatened its critics. Now they’re being prosecuted at the SDT.

Their response? An anonymity order to cover it up. But Carter-Ruck just lost that order - and it's all coming out.

Thread Image
Image We’re publishing everything - the background, the filings, the timeline: taxpolicy.org.uk/2025/09/18/car…
Sep 14 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
What happens when you pay a fortune for tax advice from someone, and the advice turns out to be incompetent? And HMRC demands the tax back plus penalties?

If you guessed "you get all your money back" then I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed. Image Dodgy R&D tax firm ZLX made large research and development tax credit claims for its clients, charging a 30% fee. Often these claims had no legitimate basis
Sep 9 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
Every second a Labour MP spends campaigning for a wealth tax is a second that could be spent campaigning for real tax reform that could make the tax system fairer, boost economic growth and (unlike the wealth tax) actually happen.

A thread: Image There will never be a wealth tax in the UK. Anyone who's looked at the evidence knows it would take years to implement, would hit investment, damage growth and kill jobs.

The evidence: taxpolicy.org.uk/2025/07/22/uk-…Evidence shows the wealth tax would hit long-run GDP by 2% to 5%, would produce no revenues before 2029, and those revenues would be much less than proponents claim.
Sep 4 • 19 tweets • 6 min read
Last Tuesday, I awoke to an email from the High Court, rejecting an attempt to silence me with an interim injunction

This came as a surprise, because I'd no idea anyone had applied for an injunction. Even though this was an "on notice" injunction application

A quick WTF 🧵 Image Longer version of this thread, with copies of the injunction application and the court's response.

(Spoiler: it wasn't a very favourable response)

taxpolicy.org.uk/2025/09/04/set…
Sep 4 • 22 tweets • 6 min read
The Telegraph says Ms Rayner sought advice from "a conveyancer and two experts in trust law".

So how could they all get the law wrong? A 🧵
with some speculation.

(Pure speculation, but based on my experience of how clients and advisers behave.) Image Some possible scenarios:
Sep 3 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
It's very unusual for someone to pay the wrong amount of stamp duty when they're receiving tax advice.

There are probably three possibilities:

(1) Ms Rayner got the law wrong
(2) She didn't take the right advice
(3) She didn't disclose all the facts to the law firm. Image If it's the law firm's fault, then hard to blame Ms Rayner.

If it's scenario 2 or 3, then completely fair to blame her

Given Ms Rayner's position, it's reasonable to expect full transparency as to what happened
Sep 3 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
Every Monday am, we publish an updated list of every UK plc that's failed to file its accounts on time.

Sometimes a company is on the list because of Companies House delay/error.

Often, the companies are troubled, bust, or incompetent.

But sometimes it's just fraud: Image Randomly clicking through the list, it's pretty obvious which are just innocent errors, incompetence, etc... and the frauds quickly stand out.

Meet Herran Finance plc. Image
Aug 24 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
How much tax do we pay in the UK, compared to other countries?

This much: Image Or if we order it by income/payroll taxes instead: Image