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
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.
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.