ABSTRACT
Inheritance Tax 2common Inheritance Tax avoidance strategies People often think that tax planning is a magic art involving smoke and mirrors, offshore tax havens and elaborate trusts which cost a fortune to set up. In fact, the more complicated your scheme, the likelier the Revenue are to treat it as a challenge-and they have powers to unravel intricate arrangements if they believe you have made them for the sole purpose of dodging tax. Until relatively recently, the courts would apply a strict interpretation of tax law which favoured the taxpayer. In the 1929 case of Ayrshire Pullman Motor Services v The Commissioners of the Inland Revenue, Lord Clyde famously remarked:
No man in this country is under the smallest obligation, moral or other, so to arrange…his business or his property as to enable the Inland Revenue to put the largest possible shovel into his stores.
