Chiltern and Grant Thornton have both rounded on chancellor Alistair Darling for the changes to capital gains tax and inheritance tax announced in yesterday's pre-Budget report.
Ian Maston, director of IHT at Chiltern said doubling the IHT threshold for married couples, civil partners, widows and widowers to £600,000, rising to £700,000 by 2010-11, wouldn't save people who had planned their affairs anything.
'Prudent people would have already arranged their Wills to achieve this anyway, so the chancellor's announcement won't save them a penny,' Maston said.
Heather Self, international tax partner at Grant Thornton said people doing 'the most basic planning' would have already enjoyed the benefit of the change to the thresholds.
On the issue of CGT, Chiltern said that the abolition of taper relief would hit small companies, employees and self-employed workers the hardest, rather the just the private equity houses it was meant to target.
'This will strike far beyond private equity,' said Chiltern's director of corporate tax Bernard Sweet. 'Many smaller companies, their staff and investors will suffer as this relief is withdrawn. This could backfire on the government - it is a blow to hard-working entrepreneurs.'
Self said that although scrapping taper relief was a 'major simplification', it did seem as if the measure had been 'rushed' and not properly thought through.
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