What’s new for 2025?
Additional importance is placed on ethics, law and administration topics – up to 20% of the total marks. Requirements on these areas are the ones that students generally answer least well, with most students scoring less than half the marks in recent ethics questions. Admin questions tend to be poorly answered too. Students often rely on scoring well in computational questions for most of their marks, but this becomes more risky if you are sitting Tax Compliance from March 2025 onwards.
So, some focus is needed, particularly if you are tackling ethics, law and admin as home-study topics. Here, the Tax Compliance examiners share tips to help you maximise your marks.
Ethics topics
All the ethics material is in Chapter 1, making it a very important chapter. Ethics questions in Tax Compliance primarily test your knowledge. This is helpful since you will not need to discuss complex scenarios. However you can only score a pass mark in ethics questions if you know the material. There is little that can be guessed. We routinely see errors such as wrong definitions of tax avoidance and tax evasion; confusion between fundamental principles and safeguards; lack of awareness of the Standards for Tax Planning; and uncertainty as to when and how anti-money laundering regulations apply.
Administrative topics
Admin questions can often be answered from the Hardmans Tax Rates and Tables available in the exam. If you learn to find things like deadlines and penalty rules, these should be some of the easiest marks to score. Practise using Hardmans from the outset, as you familiarise yourself with the exam software. Use the contents list and the search function, so that you can find the relevant information quickly and confidently.
What else will be different?
Tax Compliance papers in 2025 will still have five questions, with the total marks for each the same as in recent years. The major topics will still be tested in the same order, so for example Q3 will focus on capital taxes and Q4, corporation tax. There will be no change to the overall style of the questions. But expect to see more ethics and admin overall – up to 20% of the total marks available, including short requirements spread across any of Q2 to Q5.
Resources
There are plenty of practice questions for you to try. Do not be tempted to overlook these in favour of long computational questions which seem harder at first glance. Question practice is the best way to check how well you have grasped the knowledge you need in ethics, law and admin, and are using the Hardmans information effectively.
You can find the exam guide with an overview of the Tax Compliance exam, past papers, webinar guidance and practice software here. Remember though, if you are sitting Tax Compliance in 2025, you will see more questions on ethics, law and administration than you typically see in past papers.