The Board of Referees: ‘A Most Useful Addition to Fiscal Machinery’

In this chapter we examine the Board of Referees, an innovative administrative body established in 1915 with the remit of resolving certain questions relating to the assessment of the wartime Excess Profits Duty. The Board is particularly notable for its composition of eminent members of the practical trades, as well as professional accountants and even the occasional MP. We argue that the Board addressed certain shortcomings of the administrative architecture of the time, in particular the absence of an obvious way to control or counterbalance the great expansion of Inland Revenue discretions during wartime. We also highlight the support that the Board provided to the tax authorities with their ready commercial expertise and their ability to buy the wider business community into a tax that could have been very controversial. In terms of the legal framework, the Board was carefully designed but did undergo a significant degree of scope creep, particularly in 1922 which is when our study ends. The debates of the time have some resemblance – and therefore relevance – to recent discussions about the General Anti-Abuse Rule Panel, but the parallels should not be exaggerated.