TaxWatch’s Director, George Turner, wrote an op-ed for the Independent setting out why the government’s recent Tax Gap figures should be treated with caution.
The article sets out how the government’s estimates of tax avoidance vastly underestimate the true scale of the problem.
The full article can be accessed here:
Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash
According to HMRC figures released this week, small businesses are underpaying £37bn of due tax every year – roughly the replacement cost of Britain’s nuclear submarines. But this giant figure, already driving resource decisions, rests on an analysis of just 337 tax returns. And much of the missing tax may be accountants getting tax returns wrong, not high-street criminality and deliberate tax fraud.
HMRC’s latest figures present a very different picture to previous years. The amount of due taxes going unpaid may be £6 billion bigger than previously thought — and going up, not down. Any incoming prime minister (or Chancellor) will have to go faster and further to tackle tax non-compliance if they want to stick to current spending commitments, let alone introduce new ones.