A New Year

So, it’s the sixth of April and the new fiscal year begins today. Or, to you and me, a new tax year. Strange date to choose for a new tax year, don’t you think? Why not be logical and rational and start at New Year? But it’s 6 April, and has been for a long time now. I’ve never yet met an accountant or banker who could tell me why this arbitrary date had been chosen.

English taxation goes back, like so many things, to Magna Carta in 1215; taxation had to be renewed annually, with taxes being due at New Year.

There were actually two New Years, a secular one on 1 January, and a liturgical one on 25 March. This is the Feast of the Assumption, the traditional date on which Mary was told that she was ‘with child’. 

Tax was due at the liturgical New Year.

By 1752, the calendar in Britain was 11 days out of synch with the sun and the seasons. A change from the old Julian calendar to the (new) Gregorian calendar had been resisted on the grounds that it was ‘Popish’, but the discrepancy was to big to be tenable any longer.

A commission recommended that Britain change to the Gregorian calendar, and legislation provided for almost all legal things to be accommodated to this — the lengths of prison sentences, for example. And New Year was fixed at 1 January. 

They reckoned without the views of the taxpayers.

It was expected that a full year’s worth of tax would be paid 11 days early, and the taxpayers simply revolted, and didn’t pay. They waited 11 days, and then paid up. Work it out, and you’ll find it was 5 April. Curiously, the tax year continued to use the Julian calendar. The year 1800 would have been a leap year in the Julian calendar, but wasn’t a Gregorian leap year, so 6 April became the start of the tax year from then.

It wasn’t until the early 1800s that the position was formalised, and 6 April became legally established as the start of the tax year. 

So who’s to thank (or blame) for this? Julius Caesar, Cleopatra and the Pope.