Happy New Tax Year!

I'm not sure why April 6th is the start of the new Tax year, it seems a bit of a strange date but for whatever reason today is the first day of the new tax year so enjoy that extra £600 personal allowances and remember to check your payslips that you are on code 1000L and HMRC are not skimping on you.
As many students mistakenly think every year and to their amazement find out every year, student status does not exempt you from paying tax and if the code is wrong and you don't pay enough tax at the end of the tax year, the employer is not liable to pay the shortfall, you are as you received the extra and therefore you need to repay it.
Tax Freedom Day is the first day of the year in which a nation as a whole has theoretically earned enough income to fund its annual tax burden and that date in the UK is September 3, 2014, which is 150 days from today.
The shortest is India with 74 days and the longest is Norway where they have to work for 210 days until their tax burden is paid and the country is no longer working to pay the government.
As the tax we pay goes to pay the salary of nurses, policemen, military, teachers and roads, hospitals, prisons, schools, the NHS and plenty of the essentials of life, it is understandable that we get angry when we hear about people cheating the benefit system to a cost of £16.9 million of our money.
Strangely, the amount of tax lost through avoidance schemes such as off shore accountants and schemes which minimise the amount of tax paid such as the ones Jimmy Carr, Chris Moyles, Gary Barlow and Mark Owen have been caught dealing in deprives the Government of £35bn, it seems the Government are targeting the wrong people as an extra £35bn would sure pay off a large chunk of the money the greedy bankers cost us.