Tax Justice and PCS at the LibDems

Posted on

John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network did yesterday's PCS fringe meeting at the LibDem conference. The Guardian has given it extensive coverage:

A former adviser to the Thatcher government has warned that official action to tackle tax avoidance and fraud is "a drop in the ocean" in light of the amount of tax revenue lost to the Treasury, which he believes to be almost £120bn a year — almost twice the amount estimated by Revenue and Customs.

John Christensen, former economic adviser to the UK and Jersey governments, who has also worked within the tax haven industry in the past, said government plans announced yesterday at the Lib Dem conference in Liverpool to raise an extra £7bn by 2014-15 by tackling tax avoidance and frauds were "too timid".

He criticised Britain's "permissive" tax laws, which he said placed Britain in the unenviable position of leading the world on tax evasion, with over half of all tax havens around the world being British, he said.

Christensen, part of the non-partisan Tax Justice Network, said the government needed to reverse the job cuts in HM Revenue & Customs — which unions say have numbered 30,000 over the past five years, to allow tax collectors to claw back the billions of uncollected revenue.

He told a fringe meeting at the Liberal Democrat conference in Liverpool organised by the Public and Commercial Services Union (but not listed in the conference guide), that tax avoidance by the wealthy who pay accountants to identify loopholes had become "too respectable".

Those who shunned paying their dues to the nation's coffers ought to be named and shamed in the same way as those convicted of benefit fraud, he said.

"HMRC are doing deals and settling out of court with people who have been avoiding tax for many years," he said. "There is a fundamental injustice here."

Christensen said that the government needed to apply an "anti-tax-avoidance principle" and crack down on slack tax laws.

He cited one mechanism that allowed large companies and supermarket chains to avoid VAT on items worth £18.50 or less by shipping products such as DVDs and CDs to Guernsey and Jersey before posting them back to the UK for sale.

Christensen said the "anti-competitive" loophole, put in place as a special arrangement in the 1960s to stop flowers being shipped to the UK perishing during delays at customs, was benefiting the "big players" at the expense of small businesses.

A Lib Dem MP who attended the meeting and backed the coalition's budget deficit reduction programme described the loophole as "mad".

The rest if worth reading too.


Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:

You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.

And if you would like to support this blog you can, here: