by Claire Aston | Oct 11, 2023
The Shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, announced plans to appoint a Covid corruption commissioner at the Labour Party Conference this week. The speech was low on detail, except for reference to a figure of £7.2bn of fraud against the taxpayer related to Covid...
by Claire Aston | Jul 20, 2023
£1.13bn – revised estimate of error and fraud in 2020-21 (previously £338m) 24.4% – revised rate of error and fraud in SME scheme (previously 5.5%) £1.05bn – estimated error and fraud in 2022-23 HMRC have finally published initial data from their random enquiry...
by Dr Pete Sproat | Apr 24, 2023
In 2016 Chancellor George Osborne declared the introduction of the loan charge would “shut down disguised remuneration schemes”. Yet HMRC estimates 31,000 people used such schemes in 2020-21, resulting in a loss of £400m in tax. The authorities have attempted to...
by Alex Dunnagan | Apr 6, 2023
This piece on research and development tax relief was originally published in the R&D Tax Credit Insider newsletter on LinkedIn. What does the money achieve? R&D tax relief is an important government policy intended to incentivise businesses to incur...
by Alex Dunnagan | Mar 14, 2023
R&D reliefs predicted to cost over £9bn by 2026-27 – by far the largest corporation tax relief Fraud and error in schemes total over £1.1bn in last three years R&D ‘claims farms’ continue to hard sell opportunities to claim refunds on expenditure that often...
by Alex Dunnagan | Dec 28, 2022
TaxWatch Acting Director Alex Dunnagan gave evidence to the Treasury Select Committee (TSC) on Monday 19th December highlighting the abuse of tax reliefs. Written evidence In November we submitted written evidence to the TSC for their inquiry on tax reliefs, focussing...