A new tax year dawns

April 6th is a truly significant date in the calendar of the United Kingdom; it’s the first day of a new tax year.

Once upon a time (like when my Dad did his tax return) loads of huffing and puffing over an enormous buff form, replete with boxes for numbers to be written in was the order of the day, or actually more than a day as I recall it. In those days the currency of the realm included not only the familiar pound, but shillings and pence too. There were twelve pence in each shilling and twenty shillings in each pound. Calculators were still to be invented so a facility with mental arithmetic was needed just to go shopping. My father had the trick of running three fingers, at speed, down a foolscap column of figures, one finger for the pence, one for the shillings and one for the pounds, and writing down the (always correct) total in a single flourishing movement. So if he huffed and puffed for a couple of days over a tax return, doing the sums for the inland revenue each year must have consumed a fair bit of the UK’s total production capacity. Thank heavens for the home PC and FBI (for American readers, that stands for “file by internet”).

Incidentally, next time you buy something for, oh, let’s say fifty-seven pence, hand over a pound coin, a two pence piece and a five pence piece and watch the amazement on the face of the shop assistant after they’ve wrestled with the calculator for a bit

But I digress, at least twice, from my original intent. Why April 6th? Why don’t we have a normal date for the start of the fiscal year, like the Americans and the French who pick the more memorable, if less imaginative, January 1st?

I was going to say it’s all Pope Gregory XIII’s fault, but maybe Julius Caesar should take more of the blame as he got it wrong in the first place. I refer to the correction to the calendar by some eleven days, to bring the longest day (in the Northern Hemisphere) back to June 21st (well, sort of, on average, most of the time). Britain finally adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752, a bit late, as Pope Gregory wanted a universal changeover a hundred and seventy years earlier, but better late than never.

Well I say Britain, but it wasn’t universal. His Britannic Majesty’s tax collectors refused to change, as they thought they’d lose eleven days’ taxes, so they continued blithely on using the old calendar of Julius Caesar. A few moments thought will convince you that eleven days before April 6th is March 26th which seems about as esoteric a choice of new year as you can get. Actually another shift of a day had taken place in 1800, a leap year in the old calendar, but not in the new, which takes us to March 25th, which from 352 AD was reckoned (incorrectly) to be the start of Spring and so the beginning of Christian year and so the date from which to start reckoning tax liabilities each year. Phew!

So there you have it. Presumably April 6th is not going to change anytime soon. Makes sense that Julius Caesar would be in there somewhere, after all “render unto Caesar …” and all that.