Teach children to run businesses, say lobbyists

Posted on August 24, 2018 by Guy Atkinson

Teach children to run businesses, say lobbyists

EVERY child in Europe should be taught enterpreneurship and business studies at school, a leading accountancy body will say today.

The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants’ (ACCA) European Union manifesto will call for more education in schools to counter the lack of entrepreneurial endeavour and the high rate of business failures in Europe.

Chas Roy-Chowdhury, head of tax at the ACCA, said: “We need more school-leavers who are self-starters and who are much more aware of what the big issues are, so that they don’t fail in business.”

Only 40 per cent of people in Europe want to start their own business, according to recent figures from the European Commission, while more than 60 per cent of people in the United States want to go it alone.

Fledgeling firms also have a higher success rate in America. About 40 per cent of European business ventures fail in the first five years and only 5 per cent grow into large businesses, compared with 20 per cent in the US, according to the ACCA.

The ACCA is urging European governments to agree to home state taxation, a scheme that it says could make it easier for small businesses to trade abroad. The new tax proposals allow companies that operate in more than one country to calculate all their tax under one regime. For example, a firm that does 90 per cent of its business from the UK and 10 per cent in Germany could calculate its annual tax bill using the British system. HM Revenue & Customs would then pass on a 10 per cent cut of the tax paid to the German tax authorities.

Cutting red tape for small businesses in Europe should also be a proriority for the EU, according to the ACCA. Its manifesto says: “Closely related or redundant or overly complex legislation should be removed where appropriate.”

The ACCA suggests that tax breaks for small firms could encourage them to plough money back into their businesses: “The EU should examine options to improve access to finance for small firms, whether that be through the introduction of an incentive through the tax system . . . or by working with banks and stakeholders to ensure that any finance gaps are plugged.”

The ACCA calls for agreement on a new seven-year EU budget, a single set of Euro-pean financial regulations and a reduction of the audit exemption threshold for companies. It says that the current audit theshold of €8.8 million (£6 million) should be lowered to benefit “investors who are currently being deprived of valuable, independent and verifiable information about the financial health of the organisation”.

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I’ve just re-read Richard Denny’s fantastic book ‘Selling to Win’, in which he mentions a time management technique that I learnt many, many years ago from an old boss of mine.

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