Written by: Sarah Laing
Summarising and explaining UK income tax is an enormous task, especially given the extent the legislation has expanded over the last ten years.
Most notably, Tottel's Income Tax is shorter and simpler in its approach, appearing to be aimed at the general practitioner rather than the tax expert looking for extra guidance.
Despite its more general nature, Tottel's covers a wide range of issues and provides sensible practical help, for instance on appeals, complaints and negotiating settlements with HMRC. A reasonable number of worked examples are included, though there were areas where more would have been welcome, such as when explaining self-employment loss reliefs.
In some cases this brevity has its shortcomings: for example, Tottel's section on home computers states only that from April 2006 'the exemption for computers made available by employers to their employees for private use is removed'.
It is vital that reference is made to the tax authorities' view, especially in contentious areas or where the legislation has been supplemented by practice, and the temptation to over-use HMRC's extensive and publicly available guidance is naturally hard to resist. For example, Tottel's replicates (at paragraphs 5.5 to 5.8) HMRC's misleading booklet IR56 Employed or self-employed.
Tottel's preface explicitly says that it intends to be 'more digestible' than other tax reference materials.
There were a few slips. Tottel's still has a Step 9 in the IR35 calculation although this disappeared in ITEPA 2003.
What is certain is that no practitioner nowadays is familiar with all the intricacies of income tax; most of us need one or more (of these) books to guide us through the maze.
Review by: Anne Redston CTA (Fellow), FCA, Taxation Magazine, 2007
Click here to see the latest edition of this book