A lucid examination of the UK tax system, with its maze of rules, comes from a figure working in the sector for over two decades.

It is not often one comes across an unsentimental, clear and succinct description of how taxation works in a particular country and why the desire for reform, however laudable, comes up against certain economic and political realities. The book, What Everyone Needs To Know About Tax, by James Hannam, possesses all these qualities.

In its 144 pages, the book explains three broad points about tax that politicians of all stripes often aren’t keen to point out: Taxes are plentiful in number precisely so their very complexity adds up to a large “take” from the citizen; all taxes, however they are described, are ultimately paid for by human beings, and that taxes are kept as invisible as possible so that the process of paying tax is made as “painless”, politically speaking, as can be. 

Hannam, who has advised clients on tax matters for more than 20 years and worked for the likes of EY, Freshfields and KPMG, nicely skewers some of the pretensions and claims about tax, but also warns that reform, such as a desire for tax simplification, is often hard to achieve in practice, even when the political weather is set fair for it. He draws attention, for example, to how governments in recent years, such as in the UK, have sought to blur the distinction between tax evasion and avoidance, creating ever-wider terms of reference under which to hunt after tax revenue. An in admirably unemotional prose, he explains how futile some of this hyperactivity on the part of governments is. 

Maybe if there is a fault in the book is that can get close to pessimism about the chance of available reform, suggesting perhaps that the Byzantine tax code that the UK has is inevitable, and difficult if not impossible to overturn. And while he admirably keeps his political opinions under wraps most of the time, he sometimes make assertions that could use more or in the way of argument, such as stating that inheritance taxes can be defended because he considers them “to be the fairest of taxes”. Given that inheritance tax is a tax on the freedom of a person to dispose of his or her wealth as desired, amassed over the years and through a period when a person has paid other taxes, that seems quite a stretch. If we are to be taxed on wealth we don’t “deserve” to receive, that surely reflects a sort of collectivistic idea that all wealth is in some ways owned by us all. That needs to be argued for, not merely asserted.

Such arguments aside, this reviewer liked this sharply-written tour around the reefs and shoals of the UK tax code, and wishes that all explanations of public life could be as lucid.

What Everyone Needs To Know About Tax is published By Wiley.