As the US President prepares to fly into the UK with tech bosses in tow, a new briefing from TaxWatch shows that the US government and tech industry representatives have made strongly inaccurate claims about the UK’s Digital Services Tax.
Successive governments have rejected calls for a tax advice regulator and minimum professional standards, which exist in many other countries from Australia to Germany. It’s high time that UK taxpayers got similar protections.
With limited resources, how should the UK prioritise different types and targets of tax enforcement?
UK ministers have praised five of the UK’s Overseas Territories for searchable registers revealing who really owns companies registered there. TaxWatch has found that one of these new registers doesn’t even exist, and others have erected last-minute legal blocks against access.
Stronger powers against ‘enablers’ – those who design and enable aggressive tax avoidance and evasion – are back on the table once again. But new figures show that existing powers are still not being used.
New figures on UK tax enforcement show that Pandora Papers leaks can’t supplant properly available information about who really owns offshore companies.
Quietly buried in HMRC spreadsheets released today is the news that the UK Tax Gap is consistently much bigger than HMRC previously said. New evidence suggests that the government may be under-estimating by several billion pounds the amount of income hidden offshore, and non-compliance amongst the largest and wealthiest taxpayers.
Shrinking the £40 billion tax gap and £38 billion of outstanding tax debts is going to be critical for making today’s Spending Review numbers add up. Can HMRC deliver this with a real-term budget cut?
From the White House to the tech sector, the UK’s Digital Services Tax has been described as a discriminatory ‘tariff’ almost entirely targeting large US internet companies. New statistics show that’s not quite true.
Why aren’t enablers of tax abuse being penalised? HMRC’s powers to sanction delinquent tax advisers have roadblocks built in, and there are still gaps in naming and shaming.
HMRC is recovering more missing tax from wealthy individuals. But beneath the headlines: the tax this group is underpaying may be larger than previously thought, and is likely growing, while penalties for their non-compliance have plummeted.
The government wants to step up the fight against enablers of tax abuse (again). New powers and better information can help. But HMRC is barely using the powers and penalties it already has.