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1977 B.T.R. 371 (1977)
Fiscal Fog

handle is hein.journals/britaxrv1977 and id is 393 raw text is: FISCAL FOG SIMON JAMES AND ALAN LEWIS* IN a survey of personal taxpayers in the United Kingdom, a res- pondent made the observation that some say income tax is worse than a foreign language! I One can sympathise immensely with the problems that the Inland Revenue faces when explaining to taxpayers the complex workings of the modem British income tax system. Yet there remains a suspicion that the language and presentation of the various official tax return guides and explanatory literature are not always as helpful to taxpayers as they might be. There have been a number of attempts to develop and apply methods of analysing the readability of documents issued to the public. One of these methods which is based on the average length of sentences and the number of words with three or more syllables is referred to, somewhat bluntly, as the Fog Index . Given the difficulties confronting the Revenue some fog is clearly inevitable. The question is whether there is too much of this fiscal fog. In an attempt to find out, this article applies two methods of analysis to some of the tax literature produced by the Inland Revenue, foreign tax authorities, and the private sector. But before the results of this exercise are presented, we should look first at the nature of the problem, and then at some of the other aspects of literature design. How MucH FOG? There are a number of reasons why the clarity of tax literature is important. According to Clyne,2 approximately two million adults in Britain are illiterate; that is, they have a reading age of less than the average for nine year olds. However, UNESCO consider the level of literacy to be the average for 13 year olds, but it is not known how many more people would be classed as illiterate if this definition were applied in Britain. For income tax purposes this situation would not be so alarming except that the tax net has slowly been including a larger and larger proportion of the adult population. There were 3-8 million income taxpayers in 1938-39, 14-5 million in 1948-49 and 18-9 million in 1972-73.8 It might be said that this still does not matter as the British Pay- As-You-Earn withholding system is operated on a cumulative basis * The writers are grateful to a number of colleagues, particularly Mr. C. W. Nobes and Mr. J. R. M. Willis, for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. 1 C. T. Sandford, Hidden Costs of Taxation (Institute for Fiscal Studies, London, 1973), p. 138. 2 P. Clyne, The Disadvantaged Adult: Educational and Social Needs of Minority Groups (London, 1973). 8 Inland Revenue Statistics, 1970 and 1975. 371

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