I assume a new government dept. has to be set up to oversee it. Or do the wealthy self assess? Are things like shares and investments valued once? Once per year? How is a company valued? How do you know if you qualify as wealthy? Do we value everyone’s wealth? Can’t the wealthy just relocate or move assets out of reach?
I don’t expect answers to this, I’m just thinking out loud as there seem to be a lot of challenges.
A few countries seem to have tried and continued to tax wealth but it seems far from proven and only seems to “work” in Switzerland, which is a bit of an outlier
I think the simpler solution if simply passing along the original cost basis to heirs (and without documentation it’s assumed to be zero). That way people or even families can defer taxes on income, but eventually they get paid.
Britain could just as easily tax profits on the sale of shares in British companies, regardless of the country of domicile of the company or individual that sold the shares.
We don't need wealth taxes, we just need parity between tax on earned and unearned income.
You don’t need new govt. dept. tax authority is enough. You do your yearly tax statement.
In NL they have access to your bank accounts or more like banks and brokers are obliged to provide state of accounts as per 1st of January.
Downside is you pay wealth tax on „possible gains” not actual gains on wealth above 40k€. If you have mortgage it of course is deducted from value of your house or any debts that you have documented.
In case you think collecting watches can make you hide the wealth, there are of course tax authority checks most likely if your wealth suddenly changes.
Presumably they do have a department of people checking this to make sure people aren't lying, but also Switzerland is a relatively high trust society, and taxes are reasonable, so people probably don't mind paying too much.
In the UK in 2025 I'm not sure this would work, people would try and evade it and the UK government isn't competent enough to stop them