Land tax waste

With the introduction of Land and Buildings Transaction Tax on April Fool’s Day much attention has been given to the 10 per cent rate of tax on the band 
between £325,001 and £750,000 which is seen by some as a tax on aspiration.

What many of your readers may not realise is that even where the price is below the tax threshold of £145,000 (and above £40,000) it is still necessary to make a full report to Revenue Scotland and satisfy their civil servants before the civil servants at Registers of Scotland are allowed to register the transfer of ownership.

Thus, when I recently completed a purchase at a price of £133,000 some 37 lines of information had to be completed electronically for Revenue Scotland until, surprise, surprise, the answer came back that no tax was payable.

I simply cannot understand the point of this bureaucratic rigmarole. Can the civil servants at Registers of Scotland not be trusted to work out that no tax is payable if the price does not exceed £145,000?

It would be much cheaper for the country to amalgamate Land and Buildings Transaction Tax with registration dues that are payable to Registers of Scotland and thus have only one report and one payment to civil servants.

At a time when the UK government spends nearly billions more than it earns annually then getting rid of this sort of pointless bureaucracy is long overdue.

Kenneth A Stanley

Aitken Nairn, WS

Edinburgh