Accountancy firm Grant Thornton has urged the chancellor to simplify the UK tax system in the upcoming Budget in order to boost corporate competitiveness.
Gordon Brown will announce the Budget next Wednesday (March 21st) and Grant Thornton, which has outlined its own blueprint "for the future of UK tax competitiveness", hopes he will use it to ease the tax burden on corporations.
The government and business need to work better together in order to create a more productive environment, the blueprint states, or else more UK firms will look to move their operations overseas.
"Corporates have not been at the top of Gordon Brown's priorities while he has been chancellor," said Grant Thornton's national tax office head, Francesca Lagerberg.
"Perhaps this Budget can be his final hoorah and an opportunity to let people be entrepreneurs rather than to regulate them out of existence, or to send them packing to other more tax-friendly jurisdictions."
Grant Thornton nevertheless pointed out that the UK is less bureaucratic than Europe's other major economic centres - Germany, France and Italy - and singled out the Alternative Investment Market for particular praise.
"Many of the smaller entrepreneurial companies that would otherwise list on NASDAQ have opted for the much cheaper and more lightly regulated AIM exchange," Ms Lagerberg continued.
"Maintaining that edge means maintaining the market's current tax-favoured position to draw in growth in business from both the UK and overseas."
Meanwhile, professional services group Baker Tilly suggests that Gordon Brown may choose to move to a single rate of corporation tax, although this would not be welcomed by the financial executives of smaller UK firms.
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