I was on Radio 4's Today programme this morning - making an early morning 80 mile round trip to a studio to do it.
Their blurb for the piece was:
Downing Street has rejected calls for an inquiry into the handling of 3,000 suspected tax evaders with accounts at HSBC's Swiss private bank, which has so far led to a single prosecution. The prime minister's spokesman said officials had done what they could to make sure people paid up and argued it was “right that HMRC prioritised collecting revenues” before bringing cases where they could work with prosecuting authorities. But is this a case of one rule for the rich and another rule for small business owners who come under the scrutiny of HMRC? Our reporter Sima Kotecha has spoken to Geoff Jones - a businessman who spent 5 years battling with HMRC over tax payments he was ordered to make and Richard Murphy is a chartered accountant, tax researcher and runs the pressure group Tax Research UK.
The actual interview can be heard here, at 1:34.
I hope the points I made were clear, but in case of doubt there were three issues I wished to highlight.
The first was that there has been a loss of confidence in HMRC and not just amongst the SME community, which the report that preceded the interview addressed.
The second point was that this loss of confidence is not solely because of a relatively aggressive stance taken by HMRC towards small business, although that undoubtedly exists, including cases where simple, honest, mistakes have been made. The loss of confidence is much more pervasive than that, and comes from a lack of credibility amongst HMRC's management and its resulting inability to both explain and manage its affairs. The fact that this was the eighth day in a row on which HMRC had failed to put somebody up for interview on the Today programme is some indication of that.
And third, I wished to draw attention to Labour's plan to review the structure and workings of HMRC after the election, and tried to broaden that out to invite a similar commitment from all political parties, because I think that important.
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:
My loss of confidence in HMRC goes back 35 years to a time when I worked for Sony at their Bridgend TV plant as the engineer in charge of delivering factory services. I had my own Japanese shadow, as did many of the British engineers working at the plant. I also had my own budget & the shadow was a feature of that. The motto “cost down” featured significantly in day to day life and I recall the management saying that the plant was loss making. I left to do an MBA at Boston Uni with a specialisation in “Applied Deviousness” or as the lecturer jokingly called it “International Taxation”. It was only when I covered transfer pricing that the penny dropped. My shadow was being charged to me at £5000 per month (this was 1982) and there were many shadows. Key point: even in the 1980s HMRC had made the decision to go easy on large companies that provided “employment”. Interestingly, I obtained Sony’s accounts in 1989, at which point they had a UK turnover of £450m and paid exactly zero tax. Amazon-like behaviour has been embedded in the UK for many many years.
& finally, shortly before leaving the UK, HMRC attempted to “recover” from me £400 of supposedly underpaid tax (roughly 5% of my then take home). So yes, even then going after small people was institutionalised. However, when I pointed out some basic arithmetic errors they sent me a cheque for ….. £400. I still have the letters somewhere – perhaps I should get them framed.
Good interview – Many thanks. As a non-ministerial dept, how is HMRC accountable?
It’s sort of accountable via the Treasury
But I think it’s out of control
Hence my suggestion that we need an Office for Tax Responsibility reporting to a new Select Committee on Taxation