Thunk. Thunk crash.
Thats the sound of several kilo’s of tax and superannuation law hitting my desk. Thousands and thousands of pages in type so small I wonder if it isn’t actually just microfiche printed out sans magnification. And you know what the scary thing is? That was only the last years updates!
One thing I learnt pretty early on in my business career (that I started off in that glorious halcyon profession called accounting), was that with tax.. well, the only thing I could count on was that as soon as I got down and really understood some areas, within a year or two it would have all changed. Sometimes not massive changes, but just enough make a little knowledge extremely dangerous. A couple of small changes to a section buried deep, deep undercover would turn it into a secret squirrel banana peel just waiting to slip you up.
So given this impossible titanic tidal wave of information that realistically I could never hope to keep on top of, I decided that I had to build a much smarter life boat or I would quickly sink. There is so much information out there that the only way to effectively run your professional life without drowning is to think a little about what actually information is. Are the thousands of pages of legislation the key, or is there some underlying structure stable enough for us bother to spend time on? How deep do we have to dive before hitting bedrock worth studying?
Well, digressing for a bit from dwelling on the nature of information, after a fair bit of thought, I have come up with some basic principles of tax and superannuation that for me at least, serve to keep me grounded and conversant enough with the fundamentals to stay effective and on top of my game.