Brown must navigate tax maze

Tax lawyers have to wrestle with the intricacies of finance acts and yet they receive little thanks from clients for steering them through obstacles which, according to many of those clients, we appear only to have identified in order to make their lives more difficult.

This task is unlikely to be made easier as the first parliament of the government draws to a close.

The Budget and the pre-Budget report are more likely to be concerned with re-election than with the effect of tax changes on those of us who have to advise on them.

So, what has been achieved and what more can we expect? Gordon Brown has been accused of being a serial tinkerer and many of his changes to the tax system seem to do little more than create complexity.

Nevertheless, some real reform has been achieved - most notably of corporation tax and National Insurance.

For many practitioners it is the changes to capital gains tax that have created the greatest headaches, and in some cases the greatest opportunities.

The introduction, amendment and re-amendment of taper relief, reducing the eventual rate of tax on some assets to 10% after four years, has caused confusion and frustration.

Critics would argue that much the same could have been achieved by a simple reduction in tax rates, but such a cut would have risked being seen as too generous to those already sitting on sizeable gains and would have failed to address the concern over short-termism, which has been a feature of New Labour budgets.

The application of the taper relief to business sales, retirements and simple property and share transactions has created almost as much difficulty for the Inland Revenue as it has for practitioners.

Let us hope that the Chancellor will see fit to open the next parliament by sweeping away the multiple tax rates he has created and replacing them with a simple two- or three-rate structure.

Linked to these changes are schemes to encourage entrepreneurship - the Enterprise Investment Scheme, Enterprise Management Incentives, new tax reliefs for research and development- which have received much attention.

Therefore, it is a shame that the government's desire to contain the cost of such measures and the Inland Revenue's concern with avoidance have made these measures more of a burden than a goad for many advisers and their clients.

Elsewhere, the taxation of trusts continues to be the poor relation of tax policy.

More attention has been paid by this government and the in attempting to block perceived and real abuse.

Combined with the consequences of the abolition of payable tax credits, some real hardship has resulted for those who need to use trusts for good reasons.

The detail of tax is doomed to suffer ministerial inattention for the foreseeable future.

If things are bleak in Westminster, the sky is somewhat brighter at Somerset House -there is now a real desire on the part of both the Inland Revenue and Customs & Excise to practise 'joined-up government'.

When it comes to tax this does mean listening to the users which to a large extent means the advisers.

Edward Troup is a partner at City firm Simmons & Simmons and chairman of the Law Society's revenue law committee.