What happens overseas is often very important to us, because politicians and law-makers don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time they come up with new laws. It is far easier to study overseas jurisdictions, and see what they have done, and implement things. The legislative move normally starts in some of the more liberal democracies such as the United Kingdom or America, and then it gets slowly but surely copied to nations and countries all over the world.

From that point of view it is very important to sense the growing move when it comes to tax affairs that is developing in these countries, with complaints in America that Mitt Romney is not paying enough tax and in the United Kingdom they have now reached the point where the Prime Minister has basically said that he feels that anybody who pays a handyman or worker at home in cash is ultimately crooking the system. They are well aware that those people that they are paying, be it your taxi driver or a worker, are not usually paying tax. In some regards this is met with howls of outrage with people naturally arguing that they can spend their money how they wish – whether in cash or via bank payments – but the flipside of the coin is that until everybody is brought into the tax system and pays their fair share of tax, those of us registered on the tax system will end up paying more because of the tax that could be collected, albeit in small amounts, from hundreds of thousands of people who are not paying their share and are avoiding coming clean into the system. The message is accountability and if you want to pay less tax ultimately, you have to ensure that more people in the society in which you live pay their fare share of tax because if they don’t, it’s going to be you with your tax number and being taxed on your salary is ultimately that you are going to foot the bill for the tax cheats.