Tax blog with Dave Hartnett

Right, back to tax. Mentioning Jeremy Newman’s blog just now made me remember something I’d been meaning to blog about: the lack of blogs by senior tax advisers.

Jeremy’s blog is worth a look – and it is perhaps unsurprising that BDO should be the first to launch their leader forth in this way given the huge push they have at the moment to take on the Big Four.

I wonder how it works for BDO from a marketing perspective. Blogs reach people in a different way to other kinds of marketing, I think. The networks and communities they spawn are large and often give you unexpected insights into who is interested in what you’re doing.

What surprises me is that tax advisers don’t use them to get their views across. Given the number of press releases we get from all the firms, why don’t advisers use blogs to highlight issues and give the views that they are sending out anyway? It’s another platform, and you’re less dependent on a journalist actually choosing to use your quote to reach an audience.

For my part, I’d like to see blogs by the following people: Bill Dodwell, the Deloitte corporate tax partner; Mike Warburton and Paddy Behan from Grant Thornton; John Whiting, Stephen Coleclough and Peter Cussons from PwC; Chris Morgan at KPMG; and Chris Sanger at E&Y.

All of them are well informed about what is going on and all of them have good gossip to pass on. So if the relevant marketing people/decision makers at those firms could, er, sort them out with blogs, I’d be very grateful.

The other person whose blog would be good fun is Dave Hartnett, HMRC’s effective policy supremo.

Perhaps things he said on the blog could be given the status of law. That would not only wind people up. It would also dramatically shorten all that tedious process of going through parliament to set tax law.