Research Editors

British government’s reforms will make it easier and cheaper to outsource Good news amidst the budget noise The British government’s proposed changes to tax and borrowing have made a stir since they were announced on 22 September.   However, amidst all the noise, there was some good news. The government is proposing to roll back the most recent changes to the off-payroll workers’ rules (also known as IR35). What is IR35? The IR35 rules apply to workers providing services to clients through personal service companies or other intermediaries. The tax authorities “look through” these arrangements to decide whether the workers are actually disguised employees and subject to employee taxes, rather than being genuinely self-employed. Introduced in 2000, the rules have been amended several times since. What’s being rolled back The latest changes, made in 2017 and 2021, put the emphasis on large companies to verify the employment status of such workers, rather than the workers themselves. ...

In short, no, at least not this version. The best use for it could be as a kind of powerful spellcheck, a belt and braces check on what the SA has done. Putting ChatGPT through its paces We tested ChatGPT version 3.5 against FINRA’s rules for research. We wanted to know if this iteration of the software could replace the supervisory analyst. The results were mixed. For example, we asked if it thought the following statement was balanced: “On the one hand, investment research is great. But on the other, it is brilliant.” ChatGPT thought it was balanced because the sentences did not express any negative feelings about either side. We then asked it to comment on the Bank of England’s decision to raise rates by 8.5%. It responded that the raise was “…an aggressive move that has the potential to significantly impact the UK economy…” thus failing to pick up the fact that the Bank has never raised rates by 8.5%. It did not consider a statement that earnings would rise by 23% to be exaggerated...