188体育

The Office of Tax Simplification (OTS) has finalised its complexity index, a spreadsheet tool for analysing and measuring the relative complexity of the UK tax system. It will be used by the OTS to identify future projects and for monitoring changes in complexity in different areas of tax.

The spreadsheet divides the tax system into 107 discrete areas. It then assigns to each area values for ten different complexity factors, six for 鈥渋ntrinsic complexity鈥� and four for 鈥渋mpact of complexity鈥�. Combining these factors using roughly equal weightings creates two numbers between 1 and 10 for the relative complexity of the tax area: one for intrinsic complexity and one for impact of complexity. 10 is the most complex, 1 the simplest. The spreadsheet can then be sorted by these numbers in descending order to find the most complex areas of the UK tax system.

The values for the complexity factors have been provisionally filled in by combining the professional judgments of five OTS staff. As this group does not have experience of every single part of the tax system, some of the values may be inaccurate. We propose to ask a wider group of people to fill in the spreadsheet over the next few months. If you are interested in contributing, or if you have any comments or questions, please email the OTS team at [email protected].