HMRC has to get its statistics right

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The Fair Tax Mark tweeted yesterday:

Hmmm🤔

HMRC's Annual Report just out.

Curious how the UK's official "Tax Gap" stays pretty much flat year-in year-out, but HMRC say in this publication that the compliance yield they realise leaps every year: up £13.3bn (64%), to £34bn, since 2012-13.

The explanation is obvious, of course. As I have long suggested, the tax gap is seriously understated because it is very largely estimated in  way that guarantees that.

And as I have also long stated the compliance yield is overstated by including exaggerated claims of tax saved in future years that no one knows would have arisen.

The result is this absurdity.

I hope a new HMRC chief executive might sort both or they will have to soon declare themselves redundant for over-collecting tax, when that is emphatically not true.


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