Letters to MoneyWeek: What does tax avoidance mean today?

A selection of letters sent in to the MoneyWeek office, and their replies.

You write that "this week's leak of the Paradise Papers revealed tax avoidance on a massive scale by some of the world's wealthiest individuals and companies" (MoneyWeek 870). Please will you and all your journalists and contributors realise the difference between tax evasion (which is the illegal evasion of paying taxes) and tax avoidance (which is the avoidance of paying taxes by legal means, and for the most part with the active encouragement of a government such as by making pension contributions and/or by saving into an individual savings account).

Increasingly, politicians and journalists on quality newspapers are muddling these terms up and labelling tax avoidance as evil and hence condemning most of the population who are obliged to make a work-based pension contribution or save into an Isa account.

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