The Budget’s third-largest tax pledge relies on a UK tax authority that is suffering from recruitment delays and unfinished IT systems. Just 26 of 6,700 extra compliance/debt staff promised by Chancellor are so far in post. A key tax to counter digital giants’ profit-shifting will remain despite Trump pressure, but the Budget has missed opportunities to tackle abused corporate reliefs now as large as the child benefit budget.
Though it’s been absent from the pre-Budget debate, the Chancellor’s second-biggest revenue-raising policy so far is a plan to boost HMRC’s personnel & systems: recruiting 6,700 more staff to chase an extra £15.5 billion of evaded tax and tax debts. Yet TaxWatch has found that just 26 of these promised new staff are yet in post, calling into question a key plank of the government’s tax and spend plans.
In the run-up to a make-or-break Budget, TaxWatch’s new State of Tax Administration report takes a deep dive into how HMRC has been running the tax system over the last year.
A tax deal for US multinationals backed by Chancellor Rachel Reeves could hand US companies a $40 billion annual tax break next year, including some $6 billion for US tech giants, according to new analysis from TaxWatch.
Previously undisclosed figures show that a single large pharmaceutical company has received a £3.4 billion tax cut – including £486 million in 2024 alone – from a little-scrutinised tax incentive supposed to stimulate UK innovation, jobs and manufacturing, even though that company has cut UK jobs and shut down UK factories.
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?