William Franklin, Partner at Pett Franklin, and Alan Garrod, a work placement student, have published an article in the November edition of Tax Adviser, the UK’s leading monthly magazine for tax professionals.

The article considers the importance of robust share scheme incentives in rewarding employees of all salaries and ages. It also shines light on the UK’s erratic and illogical income tax rates which mean that bonuses paid in a single year for performance over a number of years can suffer unfairly high marginal rates of tax and seriously detract from their effectiveness as incentives. This is a problem for middle managers and lower paid employees and will become an increasingly acute problem for young graduates who face very high marginal tax rates on their income because of the Disguised Graduate Income Tax.

William argues that well-designed share schemes can substantially moderate the distortions which have accumulated in our tax regime on income over the past 30 years. However, they are too often overlooked and undervalued for moderately or averagely paid workers.

Published in Tax Adviser in November 2017.