Blog

I am very pleased to say that the results of the November 2011 CTA and ATT examination sessions have been announced.

CIOT President, Anthony Thomas, commenting on the CTA results said:

"I would like to offer my congratulations to all 961 of the candidates who have made progress towards becoming a Chartered Tax Adviser as a result of passing one or more papers at the November 2011 examination. 327 candidates have now successfully completed all of the CTA examination and we very much look forward to them becoming members of the Institute in the very near future.

"Our examinations allow candidates a choice of which Advisory Papers to take and it is very important that they do choose the papers which are most relevant to them."

Full details of prizes and results can be viewed here

909 candidates took the examinations of the CIOT’s sister body, the Association of Taxation Technicians, on 1 and 2 November 2011. The Association is pleased to report that 69 candidates attempted the required four papers for membership and of those 51 (74%) passed all four papers.

The Association President, Stuart McKinnon, commenting upon the results said:

“It gives me great pleasure to congratulate all the successful candidates from the November sitting of our exams. In total 1,592 papers were sat and 1,076 passes achieved in one or more of our seven papers with 66 distinctions awarded for exceptional performance.

“Our modular system allows candidates to study at their own pace. Whether they are working towards full membership by sitting the three compulsory and one optional paper or whether they simply wish to obtain one or more Certificates of Competency in their specialist areas the flexibility has proved very popular.

“As a result of the examinations 228 candidates have now completed the examination requirements for membership and I look forward to meeting as many as possible at our popular admission ceremonies held at the House of Lords.”

Full details of prizes and results can be viewed here

Jude Maidment
Education and Examinations Manager
Wednesday 18 January 2012

Good to see another CIOT idea may come to fruition.

Today’s Times reports that the Government’s ‘nudge unit’ (officially the Behavioural Insight Team) are recommending that self-assessment taxpayers who pay their tax bill early are entered into a prize draw with a chance of winning £100,000.

The idea is this would save money by spreading the pressure on HMRC’s servers which currently experience a huge surge in the final few days ahead of the online filing deadline of Jan 31st.

A government source is quoted in The Times as saying: “Though nothing similar has been tried on a national basis before, 15 London local authorities have recently introduced a prize draw to encourage people to pay council tax by direct debit. With a £25,000 prize, they realised savings of £345,000 a year.”

A good idea? We think so. In fact a couple of years ago, during meetings on the Carter Review, colleagues of mine at the CIOT suggested just this to HMRC. At the time the Revenue were wary and told us they didn’t think government could do this sort of thing (though we did point out that the DVLA in Swansea were trying something similar), so the idea has been gathering dust.

Hopefully with a bit of a nudge from the nudge unit this imaginative proposal will now finally see the light of day, and save HMRC resources that can be put to better use.

George Crozier
CIOT External Relations Manager
Tuesday 10 January 2012