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 11, 2025
Responding to today’s Comprehensive Spending Review (Wednesday 11 June 2025), TaxWatch Director Mike Lewis said: With the Chancellor’s commitment to paying for day-to-day spending only through tax receipts, shrinking the £40 billion tax gap and £38...
by Claire Aston | Mar 26, 2025
Photo credit: HM Treasury HMRC’s target for prosecution ‘charging decisions’ to be set 20% above the rates achieved in 2023-24. These rates have collapsed since pre-pandemic. It will be 2029 before HMRC’s target returns to the rate achieved in 2019-20 – a lost decade,...
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 George Turner | Jun 7, 2022
Taxation magazine recently carried an article from our Executive Director looking at HMRC’s record on tackling marketed tax avoidance schemes over the last 10 years. The article looks at the differing results HMRC has achieved going after two different types of...
