HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has trumpeted three victories in the courts last month against complex tax avoidance schemes.
The Revenue said the decisions had potentially stopped as much as £200m being lost.
I'm obviously delighted that the Revenue is winning.
But let's remember in September 2011 they said all tax avoidance a year for income tax, national insurance and capital gains tax combined was £1.4 billion a year. And I refuse o believe they have closed down one seventh of all tax avoidance in the last month, so somewhere their figures don't stack. Either these schemes were worth much less than £200 million or the tax gap is much bigger than they say.
Of course, it may also be both. But what's not possible is that their claims are right, as I've said long and often.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
There are links to this blog's glossary in the above post that explain technical terms used in it. Follow them for more explanations.
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Buy me a coffee!
“HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has trumpeted three victories in the courts last month against complex tax avoidance schemes.”
The really good news in recent tax cases is the Greene King case, where as a result of the failure of their tax avoidance scheme, the company has ended up being subject to tax twice on the same amount of £20m, The tax tribunal said:
“We are unimpressed with Mr Peacock’s argument that our conclusions on issues 2 and 3 might lead to double taxation. As we have said, the transactions were a device for ensuring that relief for payment was not matched by taxation of the receipt; and the appellants have no evident difficulty with that outcome. It does not seem to us that they can legitimately complain if the scheme fails in its purpose and instead results in their paying tax twice.”
Probably unlikely that the double taxation will be upheld on appeal, but would be poetic justice if it did, and even better if Greene King sued Ernst and Young (the scheme designers)for the cost of the failure!
Indeed!