I hoped I would never have to ask if HMRC was actually corrupt but today I do. As the Guardian reports:
MPs are to investigate an HM Revenue and Customs decision to turn down a French request for help with a criminal inquiry into a major Conservative party donor.
The Treasury select committee and the public accounts committee want to explore why tax officials rejected a request from the French authorities to help with an inquiry involving the mobile network operator Lycamobile.
It follows the disclosure on Thursday that the tax authority had sent correspondence to its French counterparts which pointed out that the telecoms company was the “biggest corporate donor to the Conservative party”.
I have assisted the Guardian in particular with Lycamobile investigations over the years. The company's accounts are so bad even KPMG resigned. That there has been substantial risk is obvious. And it is the absolute duty of HMRC to assist the tax authority of another country seeking information in that case, in my opinion (subject to all due process being followed).
What was not possible, and should never have been thought, let alone mentioned, was that assistance could not be supplied because Lycamobile donated to the Conservative Party.
If that explanation has been offered then that is corruption. And prison should await for those who offered the explanation, in my opinion. Nothing less will do: an example would have to be made.
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My view is that there has always been this sort of corruption (yes, in the UK), where the powerful can pretty much do as they like, but with it was some sort of self-awareness and circumspection. The difference now is that the corruption has become so normalised that the person writing this couldn’t see what was wrong with offering this explanation of why they didn’t act.
The worst thing about this though is that if you are a small or medium-sized company and/or not a donor to the Tory Party, HMRC will come after you relentlessly until your business and life is destroyed, while the big fish are allowed to just swim away.
[…] http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2018/04/20/is-hmrc-corrupt/ […]
Strangely enough this post coincides with thoughts about the role of the BBC which to my mind has been corrupted by right-wing thinking which represents the interests of the few which is not to say that media outlets can’t be taken over by narrow left-wing thinking as we see with Communism.
My first reaction in regard to the BBC is say let it go and stop forcing the public to pay for it. My second reaction is to say no this is the wrong course of action when news outlets based on the old newspaper hard copy production is increasingly disappearing behind paywalls but the need is there for open electronic debate between members of the public together with the views of those who’ve professionally engaged in particular topics of public interest.
Surely with the UK being in such a mess it badly needs fresh ideas that can be aired whether they come from left or right of the political spectrum and the Reithian idea of a neutral forum was one well worth having.
The nub of course is how do you get the BBC back to that neutrality in an electronic age as well as technically create an effective electronic forum. As far as the first is concerned it would seem to be the same comparative government argument for not having a written constitution namely all the words in the world don’t matter or have force unless the citizens in a country have a majority collective mind-set that they need their country to have certain rules of operation in terms of how citizens relate to each other. Obviously I’m arguing here for the importance of having the means of engaging in civil discourse to enhance and improve that collective mind-set and pushing to reinstate it in a modern electronic world. In other words to use the BBC with its compulsory citizen funding to reinvigorate British democracy!
As for the technical aspects obviously feedback from citizens wanting to contribute has to be an open and continuous process and warrants the idea a re-invigorated BBC should have some form of independent panel to address these issues.
Perhaps a farcical Brexit or even the referendum producing Brexit would never have occurred if the BBC had been available as an electronic public forum during all those years because it might have forced Leavers to produce a coherent plan for getting out of the EU!
I posted this on Facebook with a tag to editor of Morning Star. I’ve just gone out to buy my copy and lo and behold this was on front page: https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/tory%20donor%20%E2%80%98fraud%20firm%E2%80%99%20protected%20from%20raids.
Such a shame that they never review MStar on telly – it’s always such a contrast to the herd.
That reads like an extreme headline, but there is something extraordinary about this case. Lycamobile are sufficiently worrying that even the Con Party stopped accepting donations a couple of years back … or so they say. Accounting practices which even fee-hungry KPMG could not turn a blind eye to. There is more to this than mere tax evasion perhaps.
Extraordinary then if France have a reasonable enquiry but HMRC turned them down flat … surely in our national interest to co-operate with international tax investigations? A special committee enquiry I will be setting my alarm for.
Well done Murph and the Grauniad.
This case as reported by the Guardian and by BuzzFeed (complete with under-cover videos of apparent rucksack ‘drops’ of cash to scattered Post Office branches) is startling. The actual compnay donations refered to include both the Conservative Party and the Prince’s Trust. If these allegations can be made to stand up, then penal consequences surely must follow. However, I would hope that they would not stop at some hapless official who may have been responsible for the communication in question, but will also initiate an in-depth investigation of how there could have been such an ‘atmosphere’?/’culture’? that such a communication could have ever been drafted, let alone sent. It is surely impossible for this to be reduced to some single ‘error’ or rogue employee. Bad apples are usually in contact with a source of rot somewhere.
Wonder if this goes all the way to the chancellor or PM.
Sounds to me like someone high in the Government stopped the Revenue from providing the information and said no this company is one of our biggest donors. The Revenue official being brassed of simply repeated what he was told to put the cat amongst the pigeons and expose the corruption taking place.
In this scenario well done HMRC
If that is the case, I agree, well done
I hope parliament finds out
That’s actually plausible.
I would expect a corrupt individual to dissemble, or delay, or simply refuse to respond.
And, I think, we have just found a signal that allows us to detect corruption. On making an enquiry about a sensitive matter, the junior official who acts as ‘point of contact’ sends the request up the chain until it reaches the matter’s ‘owner’.
A legitimate reason for refusal will be sent back down the chain to your point of contact, or an equivalently-junior official in the ‘owning’ office will communicate it to you.
That should not and must not happen if the reason for the matter’s sensitivity is unethical or illegal or a legitimate reason for a junior official to refuse to handle it.
For example, a direct lie; an act or omission which would constitute compmicity in an illegal act: or a refusal to carry out the junior official’s clearly-stated legal duties.
So your touchstone for corruption is: “Did this bland non-answer, or refusal, or obvious lie come directly from a very senior figure, or from PR and political advisers in the Minister’s office, instead of from a low-to-middling bureaucrat who could handle it willingly and well?”
Someone screwed up here: the candour is very telling and my guess is that the ‘on high’ figure was a ‘revolving door’ manager who actually viewed their answer as legitimate, and views the junior civil servants as ambitious flacks whose primary loyalty is to their patrons, not their principles, who could be trusted in any matter of impropriety.
If the Morning Star report is correct, the Tory Party stopped taking donations at the same time as the investigation by French Authorities was beginning.
The truth needs to be found out! This news does not bode well for the conservative party in power!
What utter garbage. Where is the evidence that the Tory party are behind this? For that matter, where is the context (as reported in buzzfeed) that states that the French request was turned down, as they failed to provide sufficient evidence, that would likely get a warrant granted.
This is pure, deliberately misleading, political innuendo
Just like Home Office staff got migration wrong?
And if the paperwork was wrong nothing else needed to be said, did it?