I just noticed I had a letter in the London Evening Standard yesterday. It said:

Chris Blackhurst is right that public attitudes towards tax avoidance have changed, but the Government could be doing much more.

The UK has £28 billion of unpaid tax debt. I estimate tax avoidance (legal but unacceptable abuse of tax law) to run at £25 billion a year and tax evasion (fraudulent law-breaking) at £70 billion. Tackling these issues could close the fiscal deficit.

The first step is for Revenue and Customs to recruit significant numbers of new staff, reversing recent job cuts, to address the tax evasion problem, which would also  save millions in benefit costs. Tax debt must be
tackled aggressively. UK law needs a general anti-avoidance provision that stops tax abuse before it starts; and we need to take on offshore tax havens by demanding full information from them on all income received by UK
passport-holders in those places, while abolishing the domicile rule.

If the Chancellor announced this programme next week, he’d have the country behind him.

Richard Murphy

Director

Tax Research LLP.

John Christensen covered the original story here.

I genuinely think Blackhurst is right.

People are fed up with abuse.