{"id":25886,"date":"2014-08-29T10:58:45","date_gmt":"2014-08-29T09:58:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=25886"},"modified":"2014-08-29T10:58:45","modified_gmt":"2014-08-29T09:58:45","slug":"the-uks-corporation-tax-statistics-are-just-incredible-or-wrong-if-youd-prefer-to-put-it-that-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2014\/08\/29\/the-uks-corporation-tax-statistics-are-just-incredible-or-wrong-if-youd-prefer-to-put-it-that-way\/","title":{"rendered":"The UK’s corporation tax statistics are just incredible. Or wrong, if you’d prefer to put it that way"},"content":{"rendered":"

New corporation tax statistics are out from HMRC this morning<\/a>. They can be looked at from all sorts of directions of course, but one of my questions always relates to basic credibility.<\/p>\n

A basic way of testing credibility would be, in my view, to check that it seems likely that the corporation tax system is likely to capture data on a very good proportion of all the companies that are likely to owe this tax. So i did some calculations comparing table 11.3 on the number of companies declaring taxable income to HMRC<\/a> with the number of companies recorded at Companies House (some data from here<\/a>). \u00a0HMRC only have data up to 2012-13. This is the data:<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0Let's out that another way. This is data on the number of companies not declaring taxable income over that period:<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

It was pretty staggering that there were claimed to be over 1 million dormant companies at the turn of the century but now there are nearly 2 million.<\/p>\n

I have to be candid: I don't believe that. I think there are many more trading than say so. I think it's utterly implausible that this is not the case.<\/p>\n

What this implies is this:<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Since HMRC's merger the number of companies declaring taxable income has gone down. It's recovering a little but remain at around one third of all companies.<\/p>\n

Again, I don't believe that is the number that should be.<\/p>\n

There is more on this here<\/a>\u00a0including why I think at least 400,000 of these supposedly dormant companies are trading, which given the data, seems remarkably few.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New corporation tax statistics are out from HMRC this morning. They can be looked at from all sorts of directions of course, but one of
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