{"id":15069,"date":"2012-04-16T12:22:08","date_gmt":"2012-04-16T11:22:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=15069"},"modified":"2012-04-16T12:22:08","modified_gmt":"2012-04-16T11:22:08","slug":"hartnetts-worst-moment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2012\/04\/16\/hartnetts-worst-moment\/","title":{"rendered":"Hartnett&#8217;s worst moment?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This comes from the new HMRC business plan, published today:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/documents\/hartnett.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"372\" height=\"424\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I've<a title=\"The global battle to tax offshore accounts\" href=\"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2012\/04\/16\/the-global-battle-to-tax-offshore-accounts\/\"> just posted on the battle to tax offshore accounts<\/a>. This was the moment when Hartnett, on behalf of the UK, did his best to make sure those accounts\u00a0remain\u00a0untaxed.<\/p>\n<p>Under the deal he signed:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Banking secrecy is guaranteed for Switzerland;<\/li>\n<li>We grant Swiss banks the absolute and final right to tax UK taxpayers;<\/li>\n<li>We for the first time ever agreed that a person tax evading in Switzerland can not\u00a0declare\u00a0their\u00a0income there and still have submitted a proper tax return;<\/li>\n<li>We offered preferential tax rates for those using Swiss banks over all others;<\/li>\n<li>We agreed not to\u00a0collect\u00a0billions and billions of tax evaded in the past and deliberately hidden in Switzerland with the knowing\u00a0connivance\u00a0of its banks and active encouragement of the crime by the Swiss\u00a0government;<\/li>\n<li>We undermined the whole EU effort to demand\u00a0automatic information exchange that would have delivered vastly better results from Switzerland;<\/li>\n<li>We have gone out of our way to\u00a0indicate\u00a0the UK supports tax evasion and tax haven\u00a0activity;<\/li>\n<li>We have signed a deal so easy to avoid that no one need evade it - but the result will be almost no tax collected - which is exactly what the Swiss intend.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And HMRC are proud of that?<\/p>\n<p>It's currently an organisation rotten to the core - but I just wish that would change when Hartnett goes, and I'm sure it won't. The new\u00a0Chief\u00a0Executive has a\u00a0track\u00a0record of failure she's\u00a0bringing\u00a0with her to HMRC, and knows nothing about tax. You couldn't make it up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This comes from the new HMRC business plan, published today: I&#8217;ve just posted on the battle to tax offshore accounts. This was the moment when<br \/><a class=\"moretag\" href=\"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2012\/04\/16\/hartnetts-worst-moment\/\"><em> Read the full article&#8230;<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[107,63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hmrc","category-switzerland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15069\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}