A poll earlier this year showed that 32% of those polled believe it’s acceptable to legally avoid paying tax. Most of these are probably accountants.  (YouGov/The Sunday Times)

The UK Treasury and The Inland Revenue have been failing to prevent some of the 398 different tax reliefs being exploited by people making false claims. The cost of relief for entrepreneurs, for instance, rocketed from £500m in 2008-09 to £2.9bn in 2013-14, three times more than forecast. It has been used by well-established private equity companies to reduce tax liability.

Tax is the preoccupation of accountants, who “in cricket terms keep the score but do little or nothing to score the runs”. (forgive me the Anglicism). Tax is a cost of doing business. Without tax, companies would not have available to them the whole of the nation’s infrastructure and institutions, created over many years by individual and corporate taxpayers for the mutual good. Britain is unique in the world for its accountants. America has too many lawyers, Britain too many accountants. In Britain they tend to get to the top and run business and industry, instead of sitting in back rooms, counting. The result has been the huge decline in entrepreneurialism. Accountants are not generally by nature and temperament good at new ideas or being entrepreneurial.

Were Epicurus alive I believe he would urge everyone to pursue new ideas and technologies in the quest for profit and survival. He would think tax avoidance and fiddling with the status quo simply pathetic, and would advocate making accountants the servants of industry, not the masters.