The Antichrist, HMRC, the Sun and me…

If you like numbers and languages and history, you may wonder about little things that we just take for granted.??Like the fact that in the United Kingdom we have a tax year that runs from 6 April to 5 April.??Maybe you have never wondered???As we leap past the potential 29th?day of February and await the latest budget from the Chancellor of the Exchequer I can’t help thinking about how we got here.

Benjamin Franklin wrote that “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”??The ancient Egyptians are said to have invented the concept of taxation, but it was the Roman Empire that made it into the kind of well-oiled machine we know and love today.??In fact, the census that saw Mary and Joseph on the road to Bethlehem was almost certainly linked to the establishment of tax collection in Judea.

Luckily for us Arabic numerals replaced the old Roman numeral system (although they did have a decimal system).??In a similar stroke of good fortune Napoleon managed to simplify things further by forcing the widespread adoption of the metric system, replacing the wholly illogical Imperial measures that have largely disappeared from developed countries in the twenty first century (notable exceptions being the United States and Brexit voters).

A solar or tropical year is the time it takes for the sun to return to the same position in the cycle of seasons.??The ancients measured this to be approximately 360 days, hence there being 360 degrees in a circle.??It explains why we have 60 minutes in an hour and how time has been divided up into seemingly arbitrary periods along with the preponderance of things that divide by 12.

The founder of Rome, Romulus, is credited with one of the first calendars.??If you have ever wondered about the naming of the months, it all dates back to Romulus.??You may also have noticed a slight anomaly – the later months in the year seem to be out of order.??September should logically be the seventh month, October the eighth, November the ninth and December the tenth.??Indeed, that is exactly what they were in Romulus’s calendar with just 10 months of 30 or 31 days, plus an unspecified Winter period of fifty something days to get to the full three hundred and sixty or so days that make up a year.

Later under the Roman Republic the extra months of January and February were added (creating the mismatch of names and order), and the year was more accurately measured as 365.25 days.??Some judicious renaming occurred to honour Julius and Augustus Caesar (July and August).??Things remained largely unchanged with the calendar.??The Roman Empire fell Christianity, and ultimately Roman Catholicism, flourished.

Fast forward to the reign of Henry VIII (those Roman numerals again!) and the English Reformation.??Thus, began a division that has lasted until the present day which along the way had English monarchs branded heretics and even the antichrist.

Of course, taxes have been a fixture in the United Kingdom long before it was united (and will no doubt remain if it becomes disunited).??Income tax was first introduced at the time of the Napoleonic wars (although given all he did for decimalisation I’m not entirely convinced he was such a bad sort?!).

It may come as a surprise to learn that not so very long ago the Christian year began on 25 March or Lady Day (named for the conception of the baby Jesus) rather than 1 January.??The tax year was also aligned to this old calendar.??It turns out that the solar year is not 365.25 days, but a slightly shorter 365.2425 days long.??Thus in 1582, just after the schism with Rome, Pope Gregory, in the now time-honoured tradition of modest naming conventions, came up with the Gregorian Calendar to replace the Julian Calendar.??However, the UK didn’t get around to adopting the Gregorian Calendar until as late as 1752.??By that time, we were some 11 days out of sync with the rest of the world.??In order not to miss out on tax revenue at the time of the switch, the tax year was extended from 25 March to 4 April, so it remained 365 days in total.??In 1800, just after the introduction of income tax, the Julian calendar would have had a leap year, but the Gregorian calendar was not a leap year (because it is divisible by 100, but not 400 – the agreed way to deal with those extra decimal places!).??So, the Treasury moved the start of the tax year to 6 April and so it has been ever since.

Whilst I find the slavish adherence to a calendar year system for taxation a little out of date, I suppose it has some quaint charm, unlike taxation itself.??At least in the UK a business is able to choose a financial year that is different to 31 December.??So, as you scramble to put your affairs in order ahead of 5 April, spare a thought to why that day makes the UK unique.??Perhaps we should think about an alternative system of taxation that doesn’t slavishly adhere to a dating system that is millennia old, that creates all kinds of artificial behaviours.??Personally, I think we should have a rolling lifetime system of taxation that doesn’t penalise good years without compensating for bad years and removes the incentive for odd behaviour as chancellors tinker with the rules.??One constant that will remain despite these historical changes to how we measure things - death and taxes.