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| Money, what a drag.. |
Last week David Gauke pronounced that it was immoral to pay
tradesmen in cash.
I confess to being a little peeved at this statement. Not
because he doesn’t have a point but because a lesson on morality from a politician
is like being lectured to by a sewer rat on the virtues of good hygiene. What
makes it even harder to take is when that self same politician attempted to avoid
stamp duty and fees on the purchase of his second home by claiming them back
off the taxpayer to the tune of £10,248.32. That he saw nothing immoral in his
own actions but sees immorality everywhere else speaks volumes about the man.
That said I guess he does have a point in that some of that cash
probably won’t go through the ‘books’ and as a result HMRC might be down by as much
as a few quid. And that is why it was such a pointless statement to make; the
sums involved are so utterly trivial when compared to the large corporate tax ‘avoidance’
schemes that plague this country.
If tradesmen had their wits about them they would be
scoffing at such minor sleight of hand. Instead they’d be spending everyday at
hard graft within their local communities and then declaring to the tax man
that all that money was actually earnt by the missus, who is currently sunning
herself on a beach in Monaco and is therefore exempt from UK tax.
If the lady of the house is allergic to sun, sea and sand
they could always opt for the corporate classic of running most of your
business through the UK but then insisting that, despite an enormous head office
that’s sited in what looks suspiciously like London, your actual base of
operations is a small, bijou, maisonette in downtown Luxembourg. Where by happy
chance you pay a heavily discounted level of corporation tax.
If this all sounds too complicated why not just claim that
the cash was actually a loan that, for some wholly unexplained reason, doesn’t
have to be paid back!
Of course tradesmen don’t get involved in such shenanigans,
partly because they don’t make enough money to warrant such deviousness but
mainly because they tend to have a much firmer grasp of morality than those
people running this country.
Of course there are exceptions. There are people who set
themselves up on the sly, don’t register their business with the tax man and
hide all of their earnings under the mattress. However, to describe these
fly-by-night operators as tradesmen is like describing a politician as honest.
In fact these are the people that ruin the reputation of the trades and
under-cut honest businesses with their cheap, shoddy work.
As such I’m more
than happy for the chaps down at HMRC to track these people down and throw the
book at them... with one caveat; when you do so could you please stop saying that
you’ve caught a “plumber” or an “Electrician”. You haven’t! You’ve caught a fraudster
who’s been masquerading as a tradesman.
