Tax, not cuts to plug public deficit.
AccountingWEB reports:
HMRC should focus less on spending cuts and more on chasing the £130bn in uncollected, evaded and avoided taxes, says the Public and Commercial Services Union.
The union warned that the main political parties were engaged in a bidding war over who could cut the most, whilst the government was losing billions to tax cheats.
The PCS estimates that £70bn is lost through tax evasion, while £25bn is lost through avoidance. It blamed some 25,000 job cuts at HMRC and plans to close 200 offices by 2011 for the £2.7bn rise in uncollected taxes last year.
“Job cuts in HMRC illustrate the short sightedness of crude cuts where staff chasing tax have been axed, even though they recoup £600,000 each after staff costs. It is no coincidence that as HMRC staff have been cut, the amount of uncollected tax written off as doubtful has nearly doubled,” said Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the PCS.
PCS data on tax lost comes from my work.
Data on uncollected tax is something they specialise in though. And from my discussions with them it appears to me this is one of the big, and unrecognised aspects of the tax gap.
Why won't HMRC employ enough people to collect tax known to be due? Surely tax justice and being being fair to honest tax payers demands that action be taken?
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There is an infuriating lack of consistency in the way that HMRC treats those with unpaid tax. Some can carry on for years without any bother at all even when the tax runs into thousands. Others will be pilloried for unpaid tax with threats of bailiffs etc, even when they have real business problems. I am all for tax being collected, but there has to be some consistency of approach.
James
Entirely agreed
Officially no debt of less than £10,000 should be chased
Yet bigger sums remain outstanding and smaller ones are pursued with vigour
And why a different scale altogether for tax credits?
Richard
Both HMRC and HM Treasury have become increasingly politicised at senior levels. It is more important to the mandarins to act like Uriah Heep with ministers than to do what statute requires of them.
The Girrl
Richard, where is it written down that debts of less than £10000 should not be chased?
@James from Durham
It is not
But I’m told it is policy by many senior people…
And it’s mad
That’s a lot of the self employed
R