{"id":45436,"date":"2019-06-26T08:53:26","date_gmt":"2019-06-26T07:53:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=45436"},"modified":"2019-06-26T08:53:26","modified_gmt":"2019-06-26T07:53:26","slug":"beating-the-offshore-tax-gap-has-happened-because-we-thought-outside-the-treasury-box","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2019\/06\/26\/beating-the-offshore-tax-gap-has-happened-because-we-thought-outside-the-treasury-box\/","title":{"rendered":"Beating the offshore tax gap has happened because we thought outside the Treasury box"},"content":{"rendered":"

The FT has reported that<\/a>:<\/p>\n

People hiding money overseas are increasingly being caught by the UK tax authority, which has sharply increased revenue from undeclared offshore assets in the past year.<\/p>\n

In the 2018-19 financial year, HM Revenue & Customs\u2019 offshore, corporate and wealthy unit netted \u00a3560m from investigations into British taxpayers with offshore assets and income, up from \u00a3490m in 2017-18; a 14 per cent increase. The data also revealed a 72 per cent increase in tax collected since 2016-17 when \u00a3325m was raised.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As the article agrees, much of this is down to the success of automatic information exchange from tax havens. As a result of that, the tax gap has been reduced.<\/p>\n

I have some form in this area. In June 2009 - a decade ago, almost to the day - I was told by HM Treasury officials that my idea that there could be a simple form of automatic information exchange from tax havens that would create the smoking gun to assist the recovery of funds from reluctant to declare offshore tax abusers was a non-starter and 'would not happen in my lifetime'. So I wrote a blog<\/a> on the issue. And a paper<\/a>. And that automatic information exchange happened, in my lifetime.<\/p>\n

Now don't get me wrong: I am not saying I single-handedly changed this law. I did not. Along with many others I played a part though and in my case, partly by thinking outside the Treasury box. And the result has been more tax paid, in ways that the Treasury once thought impossible.<\/p>\n

Sound familiar? A decade on I still seem to be having such arguments<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The FT has reported that: People hiding money overseas are increasingly being caught by the UK tax authority, which has sharply increased revenue from undeclared
 Read the full article…<\/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":[50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tax-gap"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45436","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=45436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45436\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}