This is a complete tax system. It contains a cassette holding about 220K of Basic in fifteen programs. Supporting the cassette is a well-presented, readable and fully detailed UK income tax guide.

The guide can be used on its own, and is similar to other guides available in book shops. Instructions for using the cassette on the BBC Micro are contained on a card inside the library case. Instructions for using the cassette on the BBC Micro are contained on a card inside the library case.

Several forms for recording data produced by the programs are also included in case the user has no printer. It is quite difficult, when reading an ordinary tax guide, to know just what is relevant to your particular circumstances.

When your tax return is completed, you may still be unsure as to whether you are a tax evader or a tax avoider. (It is illegal to be a tax evader, and you will be financially poorer if you are not a tax avoider.)

What is needed, is a program that will take you step by step through every stage of filling in your tax return; that refers you to the relevant parts of the guide only when necessary; that keeps a constant check on your total tax liability, and that advises you of the most advantageous tactics. This system does just that.

The cassette programs loaded satisfactorily and are automatically chained. All the displays are in mode 7 and well laid out. Most programs are between 30 and 60 blocks in length and take quite a time to load. A disc version would be a distinct advantage here, but the cassette version supplied will not run directly if transferred to a disc. If you have a printer, the program will provide a print-out of all the important data.

The printer procedure consists of finding the ASCII character at each of 960 successive screen locations, and sendinf that to the printer. This produces rather too many blank lines in the print-out. There are no CHR$(13) characters on the screen, and so the procedure needs to insert these at the end of each screen line. Programs on Side A of the cassette did this satisfactorily, but not those on Side B. For example, line 4060 in the final program reads PRINT CHR$(A); whereas it should read:

VDU1A:IF I MOD 40=39 THEN VDU 1,13

When the system bypasses programs that are not relevant for your tax return, it asks you to advance the tape to a particular value on the tape counter, however cassette counters differ widely, so this can only be a very rough guide.

Unfortunately, the screen clears when the cassette motor is turned on, so that the tape counter value is lost from view. There were no other detectable errors or omissions which, considering the size of this package, is extremely good. Another point worth making is that it would be useful to use a colour TV/monitor because blue does not show up too well in black and white.

If you are an employee and have only one source of income, the package will take about two hours to work through. If you are a director of several companies, with fringe benefits, income from foreign and UK sources as well as from investments, you had better advise your secretary to allocate a whole day.

Altogether, Microtax is excellent for those with anything other than the simplest of tax returns. However, it is designed specifically for assisting with the 1983/4 return and for assessing your liability for 1982/3. You could need a completely new Microtax next year, and certainly whenever the taxation laws are changed. The one aspect that worries us is the need perhaps, to buy a new copy every year.