According to a recent National Audit Office report, tax forms need to be simpler and easier to fill in. Well, yes – that’s fine as a statement of the obvious, but it somewhat misses the point.

The more important question is – why is it that the tax forms are so complex? Why is it that, according to the NAO, some of the HMRC guidance requires a reading age so high that it is incomprehensible to more than half the adult population?

The answer is that tax law itself is now far too complicated. The new Income Tax Act 2007 completes the much-vaunted ‘plain language’ re-write of tax legislation. But the cumulative result of all that simplification has been to replace the 800 or so sections of the old tax law with something over 2,500 sections of new tax acts.

Much of the problem is caused because over recent years, in particular, the government approach to tax legislation has become fixated on the dual aims of countering perceived tax avoidance and concealing tax rises. Both of these militate against simple legislation.

It’s got to the point where demanding that HMRC provides the taxpaying public with simple, straightforward guidance on tax law is like asking a nuclear physicist to explain Einstein’s general theory of relativity to a ten-year old.

The time has come for a radical rethink of tax law. The fact is that a huge amount of tax law is drafted to deal with ‘special cases’ and exploiters of loopholes. The majority of the taxpaying public aren’t special cases and aren’t avoiders – and even if they were, the amount of tax ‘at risk’ is relatively small compared with the costs of complex tax rules.

There is a good case for arguing that for the majority of taxpayers there should be a simple, straightforward and easily comprehensible ‘tax regime lite’ stripped of the complexity of special rules and anti-avoidance provisions.

If you insist on having the most complex tax code in Europe, at least reserve it only for the biggest and most sophisticated of tax planners: that’s where the biggest tax revenue is at risk.

Only then is there any chance of producing for the general public the sort of simple-to-understand-guidance that NAO is quite rightly demanding.

David Whiscombe is a tax partner at Berg Kaprow Lewis and a member of the UK200Group Tax Panel