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TaxationWeb supports a petition  to keep tax law published and up to date.

Mark McLaughlin has set up an online petition to try to encourage the UK government to publish up-to-date versions of its tax legislation, in the hope that taxpayers can get to see the law under which they are being taxed.

Many will be aware of the legislation.gov.uk website. If you want to know what TCGA 1992 looked like more than twenty years ago, then it is ideal. But if you want to know how Capital Gains Tax is applied in 2014, it is distinctly less so, having failed to keep abreast of changes to the legislation in the last two decades and more.    

It seems very likely that the number of people who would like to know how tax works today will significantly exceed the number who are curious about how it worked in the nineties.

There will of course be a cost to updating the website, to keeping it up to date, and to track changes as they occur. This may be especially the case for tax legislation, which changes so frequently. But surely the public benefit – the obligation – must outweigh that cost?

In the “About Us” section of that website, it says: “We preserve the UK public record, and make it accessible… we champion wider access to information generated by the public sector, so that it can be shared and re-used by citizens, community groups and businesses”. In the context of tax legislation, that seems to be more of an aspiration, than a statement of fact. (Or perhaps “preservation” has triumphed over “usefulness” and, by implication, common sense).

Needless to say, TaxationWeb is firmly behind Mark’s petition. It is ridiculous that UK citizens cannot have ready access to the legislation that affects them, tax or otherwise. And if the petition should prove successful, dare we to dream that it might in turn encourage government to be more careful when it drafts new law, so that we might then need less amending legislation each year?

Regards all,

TW Ed