I find the Institute of Directors report into CGT and IHT curious.

The main question I have is not related to its conclusions, which are the usual menu of difficult to support conclusions about taxes that you expect. There isn't a great deal of evidence for what the body says, only clever ideas about how you could tweak this or tweak that.

We know that, you could say.

What surprises me is that the IoD is engaged in the exercise at all. What, after all, does IHT and CGT have to do with them?

This, remember, is a business lobby group. It acts in the interest of company directors and articulates their concerns. IHT and CGT are paid by individuals. This is personal, not corporate, tax.

It just so happens that a lot of company directors are wealthy and probably pay both taxes (though it's a moot point as to whether anyone pays IHT on their own estate - they'll be dead by then and probably won't care).

But that isn't a justification for the body to lobby against IHT and CGT. If rich people want to campaign against the taxes, they should do so in an honest and open way, in a body devoted to it.

'Rich people against tax' is not a great slogan of course.

Slipping these subversive views through a body that is supposed to be about something completely different strikes me as verging on the offensive.