by Mike Lewis | Aug 29, 2025
The UK is in a fiscal tight spot. The Chancellor has promised to raise an additional £7.5 billion over the next four years by boosting HMRC compliance efforts. The Autumn Budget is likely to see more measures intended to make this number go up: perhaps extra...
by Mike Lewis | Jun 19, 2025
Summary: Quietly buried in HMRC spreadsheets released today is the news that the UK Tax Gap – the gap between tax due and tax collected – seems consistently to be billions of pounds bigger than HMRC previously estimated. New evidence suggests that the...
by Mike Lewis | Jun 5, 2025
The UK is weighing the future of its Digital Services Tax (DST), under pressure from US trade threats. From the White House to the tech sector, the DST has been described as a discriminatory ‘tariff’ almost entirely targeting large US internet companies. No-one seems...
by Claire Aston | Jan 7, 2025
Error and fraud within R&D tax relief reached £1.1bn in 2020-21 (24% of all claims) before HMRC took action to stem the losses and tighten up the claims processes. New disclosure facility launched for businesses who overclaimed R&D relief wanting to set their...
by Claire Aston | Oct 24, 2024
£300 million tax lost to non compliance by UK resident individuals on offshore accounts in 2018-19 This figure appears to be a gross underestimate, definitely excluding any assets held through companies, and the treatment of assets within trusts isn’t clear...
by Claire Aston | Sep 27, 2024
Yesterday HMRC published its annual statistics on the tax relief for Research & Development (R&D) in the 2022-23 tax year. The main findings were: A fall in the number of claims made, down 21% to 65,690. Most of the fall was concentrated in the SME scheme,...
