The schoolboy who taxed the Revenue By Ben Fenton
Daily Telegraph (Filed: 01/11/2004)
The Inland Revenue wrestled for seven years with a taxing issue raised by a
10-year-old boy trying to solve a school holiday quiz: why April 5?Learned memos and copies of centuries-old acts of Parliament passed backwards and forwards within the Revenue as officials tried to provide a definitive answer as to why the tax year runs the way it does.
A document just released from the National Archives shows that Mark Meadowcroft, now 50, set the wheels of bureaucracy in motion after he and fellow pupils at Longfield Church of England primary school, Kent, were asked the question as part of an Easter holiday task in 1965.
His father, Aubrey, then employed by the Revenue's Dartford office, helped him to find the answer, but it differed from the explanation offered by the headmaster, who then began to have doubts about who was right.
"Mark won the school prize getting all the other answers right, so I suppose the headmaster thought he might have got his facts wrong and must have asked me to look into it because of my job," Aubrey Meadowcroft, now 82, recalled.
His handwritten letter to the Revenue's librarian at Somerset House is included in the file and clearly sparked a long debate. Learned journals were consulted and the Treasury was asked to consult the personal files of William Pitt the Younger, the father of the modern income tax.
The file contains relevant copies of complex tax and customs laws from the reign of Charles II, George II and Victoria. Finally, by the time an MP asked a similar question in 1972, the taxmen thought they had come up with a definitive explanation:
In medieval times, the Exchequer that collected the king's income divided the year into two periods, one ending at Easter and one at Michaelmas, or Sept 29.
This allowed sheriffs of far-flung counties to travel to wherever the king was holding court with the coins collected as the monarch's dues from his subjects without having to carry too much at one time or to make their hazardous duties during the shorter daylight hours of winter.
Later, as the sums grew greater and roads safer, it was decided to have four financial periods and in order that they should be the same day each year they were fixed to the main feast days closest to the Quarter Days, the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, and the summer and winter solstices.
Thus the accounting periods ended on Lady Day, the Annunciation, or March
25; on Midsummer's Day, or June 24; on Michaelmas, or Sept 29 and on Christmas Day, Dec 25. Traditionally, however, it remained the custom to balance the Exchequer books at Michaelmas, the Easter date having disappeared.In 1752, England finally accepted the calendar system that corrected the discrepancies caused by the Romans having slightly miscalculated the length of a year as 365 days with a leap year every fourth.
By the mid-18th century, that discrepancy had reached 11 days, so Parliament ordered that the day after Sept 2, 1752 would be Sept 14, thus wiping out 11 days. The balancing of books was transferred from Michaelmas to Christmas.
Rather than demand quarterly instalments of taxes 11 days early, it was decided to add the 11 days, making the Christmas collection due on Jan 5 and the Lady Day collection due on April 5.
It was not until 80 years later that the new Lady Day became the end of the financial year and it was for political reasons.
Parliament had become restive over the fact that the Budget, presented in the early spring, "proposed" payments including those already made in January, February and March. So in 1832 the accounting year was moved up to join the Budget and the closest Quarter Day was April 5.
Not long after, Sir Robert Peel reintroduced income tax, abolished in 1817 after it had served its purpose of raising money to defeat Napoleon, and it became inextricably linked with the preparation of the Budget.
Therefore, the Revenue's experts concluded that the headmaster had been correct, at least as far as he went. His explanation took into account the change from March 25 to April 5 as the final day of accounting, but failed to explain the finer points of why the tax year arrived at its end on Lady Day.
However, as Mark Meadowcroft said when contacted about the consequences of his question 39 years ago: "What a ridiculous waste of time."