Government urged to grasp the nettle on Income Tax / NIC's alignment

A plan for radical reform of National Insurance (NI) has been welcomed by the Chartered Institute of Taxation. The Institute sees the potential for significant simplification of the Tax system and encourages the Government to seize the opportunity to make this plan a reality.

The Office of Tax Simplification (OTS) set out the plans in their report:- 'The closer alignment of Income Tax and National Insurance' that were published this week.

Commenting, Colin Ben Nathan, Chair of the CIOT's Employment Taxes Sub Committee, said:- "It's time for the Government to grasp the nettle of aligning Income Tax and National Insurance. The 2 Taxes perform much the same purpose. Having 2 different systems for calculating and administering them creates unnecessary inefficiencies and administrative burdens. Some will make the case for full merger, but even short of this many of these burdens can be reduced by integrating and aligning the 2 Taxes. The OTS's report sets out a much needed roadmap for how this could be done. Simplification and alignment would reduce the cost on businesses, employers, individuals and HMRC. This would also free up resources for HMRC to be redeployed to tackle other areas and also meet government spending reduction targets. It would also enable swathes of the NI legislation to be repealed from the statute book; the latest edition of Tolley's NI Contributions runs to over 1,000 pages!"

On the specific proposals made by the OTS, Colin Ben Nathan said:- "The OTS have recommended putting employees' National Insurance on an annual basis and aggregated across employments as happens with Income Tax. If the Government is serious about alignment then this has to happen. It would obviously create winners and losers and where the low paid would be among the losers the Government should consider enacting compensatory measures at the same time as making this change. Raising the threshold at which people start paying NI would be one possibility. The OTS are sensible to recommend that NI for employed and self employed people should be aligned as closely as possible. The more that employment and self employment can be treated similarly, the better. And aligning definitions of earnings and reliefs available for Income Tax and NIC's; including bringing Taxable benefits in kind fully into NIC's; is also a sensible suggestion that would reduce the burden on employers. Overall the additional employee NI that this would raise could be used to finance compensation for the lower paid. On employers' NI the OTS include the radical suggestion of discarding the secondary threshold and instead basing the charge on total annual payroll costs with an 'employer's allowance' of £675,000 and a flat rate of 13.5%. This would exclude the vast majority of employers from the Tax and leave only the 10,000 largest employers paying it with 1.54 million smaller employers having no liability. This would be a huge and welcome simplification for the vast majority of employers."

However the CIOT has warned that the Government's new Apprenticeship Levy adds additional complexity to this area. Colin Ben Nathan said:- "While the OTS has been working on plans for aligning Tax and NI the Government has been implementing a brand new payroll Tax in the form of the Apprenticeship Levy, which introduces new disalignments to the system. This is an example of the Government introducing new complexity faster than OTS can help dismantle the old. Any plan for turning employers' NI into a payroll Tax needs to consider how the Apprenticeship Levy will fit in."

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