From this morning's Guardian:
What has he got to hide?
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Two tier ethics.
If you are member of the ruling class – cheating the Revenue, and other crimes are ignored and you have a circle of friends only too willing to cover up for you.
However should you be a member of the ruled class and you cheat when making your benefit claims, your on your own, no excuses – the full weight of the law is brought to bear down on you and it is jail time for you!
HRMC have no incentive to prosecute these people, they are happy recovering the tax and saying look how good we are, look how much tax we recovered. Any attempt to prosecute is massively labour intensive in comparison. They have no interest in making examples of these people to stop others doing it, because then they’ll have less tax to recover in the future making their own jobs more difficult. I’m sure they are just trying to ensure their long term existence. Maybe they should be targeted on a % of tax evaders being prosecuted instead of money recovered.
Lyn Homer said in terms that one of the three aims of the department was “deterrence”. If that is taken at face value then your point about protecting their existence is not valid. Indeed much of what HMRC does is nothing to do with compliance issues of this sort. I see no reason at all why effective deterrence would make their jobs more difficult: quite the reverse.
What I find amazing is that Ms Homer appears to believe that deterrence is effective though her much repeated statement that penalities of up to 200% of the tax due can be imposed.
Ask yourself: is a very rich person, who can afford to pay a large amount of money if caught, more likely to be deterred by a financial penalty than a poor or middle income person? Very rich people pride themselves on their “risk taking” and that is what is supposed to justify the big bucks. With very little chance of prosecution and loss of liberty; with very little chance that all avoidance will be detected and all sources of wealth identified, what would you expect a “risk taker” to do. It is reasonably argued that for everyone inclined to engage in dodgy dealings of any kind, the deterrent, if it exists, is more likely to be associated with the likelihood of being caught than by the level of penalty imposed when one is caught. But that is not the whole story, because there is also the fact that the penalty must be significant to the individual concerned
We need not guess about that. It was acknowledged at the PAC, in a refreshingly honest exchange
http://thosebigwords.forumcommunity.net/?t=49310661&p=371123398
Cameron has plenty to hide – on this and many other issues. His performances at PMQs show why the whole charade is a farce (at least given the way it is currently constituted). Cameron lies repeatedly every week, simply making up statistics as he goes along, but faces no sanction for doing so. Indeed, were an opposition MP to point out that he was lying, that MP would face expulsion from the House for “unparliamentary language”. Is it any wonder that so many people think our political system is broken beyond repair?
Agreed
Last time I was in a bank I didn’t discuss with the Chairman my account. SO I am not so sure the good Rev was aware of what was going on. It political point scoring all around that doesn’t cover the real lives of many people.
The Chairman is a director
The directors have a legal duty to create systemsn to ensure the law is complied with
Your argumen is an excuse for abuse
Mine is based on facts
A Company Chairman’s terms of reference will include prominently:
1. Uphold the highest standards of integrity and probity.
2. Uphold good Governance.
3. Ensure that all policies and procedures are followed and conform to the highest standards.
4. “Ensure that they [the Board] are fully informed about all issues on which they will have to make a decision, through briefings with the Chief Financial Officer, the company secretary, and members of the executive management as appropriate.”
I think very much more should be made of where the Cameron family fortunes were if not made, then very much inflated.
I think it explains quite a lot about his approach.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/apr/20/cameron-family-tax-havens
Are you forgetting that Margaret Hodge and Ed Milliband also use family trusts?
No
But it does not change what I said, which was purely about whether this is normal, or not, which is how I interpret vanilla
Fortunately we have the law to tell us what is legal and what is not, and we don’t have to rely on your rather biased interpretations.
And Stemcor? You are happy to attack various companies (HSBC, Barclays, Starbucks to name but a few) for their wrongdoing. Are we going to see an expose piece detailing all the nasty things Stemcor have done – like export violations, illegal mining and alleged sanction busting shipping fraud?
It looks like you have just done it to save me the need
I’m not convinced that Camoron has much “to hide”. What the exchange shows is the Bullingdon approach when things go wrong. In the case of PMQ a mix of blather and bullshit is deployed. In a related case (the Hinkley nuclear station & Austria) the modus operandi is threats and bullying. When Camoron was at Carlton TV he was known to be a keen proponent of all (blather, bullshit, threats and bullying). makes you proud to be British doesn’t it?
If you add it all together:
bedroom Tax +
benefit sanctions+
help to buy (bubble)+
In work poverty+
Tuition fees+
Austerity myths+
Vilification of the poor+
No prosecutions for tax avoidance/money Laundering+
Nepotism in finance management circles+
ad nauseam
we’ve got 19th Century version 2.0 but WITHOUT the truly progressive voices that existed then!
last night I went to my son’s GCSE options evening and attended a short talk on the economics syllabus (which used text books propagating the money multiplier myth); in it the teacher actually referred to the UK economy ‘recovering’ -I had to gag myself to avoid embarrassing my son (he’s opting for music instead!).
Cameron et al live in a world of bad faith and false contentiousness so dire that to even think about it for too long causes the foundations of the psyche to wobble perilously.
For years we’ve had it drilled into us that the Left are the ‘enemy within’ yet when you read stuff like this (where people who like to beat regulatory systems manage to get themselves in positions of power over such systems) then you realise that politics as it is now is just untenable.
Stop the world – I want to get off!
The most depressing thing about all this is not the furore about it, but the lack of amongst the people who really count – the voting public. Few are shocked about the revelations. In fact the public are not even surprised. It is what the Hegemony do. Moreover, just as few believe that changing leaders will make a significant difference.
Which is why, in the most important general election in a generation I suspect we will see the lowest turn out yet.