Unless something very strange happens between now and midday I will be on the Jeremy Vine show at 12 noon(or soon after) talking about the tax gap, tax evasion and why tackling it is much more important than dealing with benefit fraud.
The Jeremy Vine show is on BBC Radio 2.
The argument is simple, of course. No one condones benefit fraud, least of all me. But benefit fraud may be £1 to £2 billion a year. HM Revenue & Customs estimate tax evasion at around £35 billion a year and I reckon it is double that at £70 billion a year.
If you have to target either benefit fraud or tax evasion, which would you choose? And in that case,why did the government make the wrong choice?
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If we are going beyond the principle of ‘it’s against the law so we should pursue it’ and being pragmatic about the amounts of money involved, isn’t the correct question not ‘how big is the supposed size of the fraud/evasion?’, but ‘where will an investment of, say £Xm provide the biggest return?’ If benefit fraud is easier to fix then go there; if tax evasion is easier to fix then go there. Of course the implication of your post is that it is obvious that there will be a better return chasing tax evasion due to the sheer size of the numbers involved, but it would be interesting to know if there is any evidence in support of this assumption.
I also wonder whether you have applied the same analysis and assumptions you apply to estimating tax evasion to the benefit fraud estimates?
@lusakajoe
broadly speaking the same people chase benefit fraud as chase tax fraud. at least, the skills are transferable
there is no one I know, in the tax profession, in HM revenue and Customs, in broader civil society who does not think our tax administration would not be improved by staff
I know you cannot collect tax without having people dedicated to the task
So put people on the case
It will pay
What’s your problem with that?
If benefit fraud collection also pays do it too?
Why be mutually exclusive if you’re so sure of your case
but prima facie to argue that it’s not worth chasing 70 billion when it is worth chasing 1.5 billion seems absurd
@lusakajoe
Do you have no moral code to inform your pragmatism?
@richard
You were the one who posed a mutually exclusive question ‘which one would you choose?’. I’m happy to do both where there is a return. My point was that we should decide what to do on the basis of expected return, and not on ‘size of the absolute anount evaded/defrauded’.
@carol
It was Richard that posed the question in monetary terms. I was actually acknowledging there was a moral side to consider, but also suggesting a better way of using the numbers.