HMRC tells MPs it doesn’t know how many large businesses it’s investigating for tax fraud
On 18 May, MPs quizzed senior HMRC officials about how they’re making the biggest multinational companies pay their due taxes. HMRC officials confirmed TaxWatch’s findings that HMRC simply doesn’t know some key facts about its own tax enforcement efforts: including, astonishingly, how many large businesses they are currently investigating for tax fraud or other serious, deliberate tax non-compliance.
Private justice, public loss
While consumers’ fuel bills go up, a £1.5 billion tax bill levied on one of the world’s biggest oil traders remains unsettled. This week it announced bumper trading profits amidst the global oil supply shock. HMRC first alleged that the company’s oil trading profits were being shifted artificially to Switzerland fifteen years ago. So how are the same transactions still continuing today?
Big corporates: tax heroes or tax sinners?
A new National Audit Office enquiry to which TaxWatch gave evidence finds that large business ‘compliance yield’ – unpaid taxes that were recovered or prevented by HMRC’s efforts – has doubled over the last three years. That begs the question: are the UK’s biggest companies avoiding paying their due taxes more than previously?
Are small businesses tax dodgers or tax victims?
Parliament’s Business and Trade Committee says tax compliance is crushing small businesses. HMRC says small business tax abuse is out of control. Can both be true?
Recognising the right tax heroes
The annual Sunday Times’ Tax List claims to show the ‘unsung heroes’ who are the UK’s Top 100 taxpayers. And there are tax heroes who are paying their fair share. But not all that glistens is gold…
MPs ask tough questions about closing the tax gap
On 13 January, Parliament’s Treasury Select Committee grilled HMRC’s chief and senior staff about their efforts to tackle tax avoidance, evasion and tax debt. MPs referenced TaxWatch research and investigations in questions about corporate tax reliefs, recruitment, penalties for enablers of tax evasion, and the ‘offshore tax gap’. There was good news in some of the responses – but others raised more questions.
Making tax digital? Five things we’ve learned about HMRC’s Digital Transformation in 2025
HMRC has promised that from 2026 it will transform the way it uses digital tools to tackle tax evasion and interface with taxpayers. With the clock ticking, here are five things we found out this year about how HMRC’s digital transformation – including Making Tax Digital – is going.
A year of drift on offshore secrecy
At the very moment the Chancellor was searching for fiscal headroom at last week’s Budget, just across Parliament Square UK ministers and representatives of some of the world’s most important offshore financial centres were presiding over another year of drift and broken promises on tackling offshore secrecy.
“New £2.6bn tax compliance crackdown can’t work if existing tools are barely being used”: TaxWatch Budget analysis
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.