The Net Assets of UK Private Companies could easily be £6.4 trillion or more. A 1% net asset tax could raise £64 billion!

I had already showed that the 400 public companies in the UK have net assets of around £1.4 trillion, based on the numbers that anyone can find at the CompaniesMarketCap site. It would be trivial to simply apply a 1% annual tax on all such companies with positive net assets, raising a very useful £14 billion.

But what about the net assets of the UK's privately owned companies? 

I had a look at the remarkable website at the UK's Company Registry. It is absolutely trivial to obtain a complete list of the 5,463,264 companies that are currently active. Just click on this link.

You can find other types of companies

• 7,475,40 are Dissolved 
• 14,172 are "Open" (whatever that means) 
• 7768 are "Closed"
• 28,949 are "Converted Closed" 
• 2,987 are in Receivership 
• 111,176 are in Liquidation 
• 3537 are under Administration 
• 469 are  undergoing Insolvency proceedings
• 491 are described as "Voluntary arrangment"

And, if you just want to restrict the search to Active Private Limited Companies, you get a total of 5,128,075 companies. 

Amazingly, for all these companies anyone can download all the legal documents for free, including the current financial statements. These include a full statement that includes the assets, liabilities and net assets.  

So, what would be the net assets of those 5,128,075 active Private Limited Companies?
Well, I could download all the accounts, and do the sums. 

But, to get a preliminary estimate, I selected the 8848 companies that were incoportated during the first quarter of 2000 and still going. Here's the link for that search if you want to see them. You can download the first 5000 as an CSV file, by just clicking on a link. 

I can then use the name of each company to access the accounts.  For example, take a company called called UKOS LTD whose address is Unit 6 Grovelands Boundary Way Hemel Hempstead HP2 7TE England. Searching by name gets you to this webpage, where you just have to click on the link to download a pdf of the companies latest accounts. And on page 3, you can find this statement - where it says very clearly that UKOS Ltd has NET ASSETS of precisely £538,817. It's as easy as that. 

 I did this for the first 100 companies my list - which really looked random. 14 were described as dormant, with net assets typically of £1 to £100. 15 had negative net assets. But, if I took the total net assets for the 85 that had positive net assets, I got a total of  £123 548 807. 

So, this first look suggests that if I scaled up to the 5,128,075 active Private Limited Companies in the UK, the total would be something like £6.4 trillion. And a 1% net asset tax would generate around £64 billion.
This would require zero work, because all the accounting data is already done. 

And here's the best part - this is all completely FREE! Anyone can verify my results by going to the Companies House website and randomly sampling companies themselves. It may be that the net assets of companies that were incorporated in Q1 of 2000 are not representive. I would have to spend a couple more hours to confirm that.  But the data that Richard claims is too complex to collect is sitting there, free, for 5.46 million UK companies. No fees, no administrative burden, no valuation disputes - just the net assets that companies already calculate and file every year.

So, Richard, I simply can't accept your claim that taxing net wealth would be difficult. I have just demonstrated that a 1% tax on the net assets of Private Limited Companies and public companies would generaate an impressive 64 + 14 = £78  billion. That's not far off the £90 billion that you propose to raise by 30 different tax reforms. And I haven't even started on taxing individual net wealth! 

This also deals with Richard's claim that the wealth of individuals can be hidden if they decide to leave the wealth with companies where they are shareholders. With my fixed 1% tax approach, it really doesn't matter whether the financial assets are described as belonging to the individual, or to the company of which they are an owner. 

If I can just find some figures on the amount of wealth that has been transferred to trusts, this would be even more effective as a strategy. There would no longer be an incentive to hide wealth in companies or trusts, because the tax rate would always stay the same. It's simple, easy to understand, and very difficult to avoid.