The taxman is getting more aggressive – so what should you do?

Merryn Somerset Webb explains what steps you should take to avoid giving yourself an unexpected tax-related headache.

Tax: the price we pay for living in a civilised society? Or, as Peter Hitchens puts it in The Mail on Sunday, the "price we pay for handing over too many of our responsibilities to the state"? The answer is that it should be mostly the first, but that in much of the West, it is fast becoming the second.

It is also hard to argue with Hitchens' insistence that the "current frenzy against tax avoidance is churned up by a government that cannot control its borrowing and so is frantic to grab all the money it can get".

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.