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30 April 2013updated 22 Oct 2020 3:55pm

Margaret Hodge shrugs off “tax prat” line

Interview with the PAC chairman.

By Economia

It’s been an interesting year for tax, and in particular the debate about where the line is drawn between legitimate tax planning and aggressive avoidance. The focus on whether everyone is contributing their fair share is a consequence of austerity and is being played out all around the world, where every pound, dollar and euro of income is more valuable than ever.

In the UK, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), the body responsible for shining a light into the murkier corners of government finance and making sure taxpayers get value for money, has been at the heart of this debate. The current chairman of the committee is Lady Margaret Hodge. Lady Hodge (the title comes from her second husband) is proud of the PAC’s work on tax, a project it kicked off after a whistleblower reported a so-called sweetheart deal between Goldman Sachs and HMRC. In getting the committee to focus on the issue, Hodge has turned tax into something of a personal crusade.

In the process she rounded on tax advisors, including accountants and lawyers, who devise tax-minimising schemes. The PAC hauled the top tax partners at the Big Four in for a challenging session. In the process she has earned the ire of parts of the profession. Taxation dubbed her its “Tax Prat of the Year”, in a cover story that challenged almost every aspect of the PAC’s report.

Sitting in her Westminster office, Hodge shrugs off the “tax prat” line and claims she doesn’t have a view about the accountancy profession as a whole. “There are people who do a good, honest job. But there is a divide. There are others, in accountancy and the legal profession, who take a different view to mine about the role of tax in society.”

Anyone who has followed the work of the PAC, or indeed who has followed Hodge’s career, won’t be surprised to hear her mount a passionate defence of the positive redistributive role of tax.

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“There is a civic duty on all of us to contribute according to our means to the common good,” she says. “In very practical ways all your readers want a public transport system that works and want the realm defended and so on. Even if you can manage on your own and don’t need the support of the state, there are all sorts of things you want from the state and there is a moral imperative to pay a fair contribution to society.

“I know there are people who don’t think that way, I just disagree with them.”

Hodge admits the PAC stumbled onto tax avoidance as an area for investigation, but she is clear why it has become such a defining issue.

“The reason it’s become a big issue is because we’re living in hard times and everyone is feeling the pinch. People want to know everyone is paying a fair share. And it is about fairness. There are those who see tax as just a legal obligation, but I don’t agree. There are legal obligations, but they arise out of a civic duty.”

The rest of this interview can be read on economia.

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