The Tax Office has recently released the figures that demonstrate their success in the last six months of this tax year – £109 million back into the public purse. Broken down, in the first quarter they recovered £64.9 million – double the amount for the same period in the previous year.
HMRC launched its first ‘taskforce’ in 2011 as the first steps in resolving the massive problems of tax fraud and evasion. There have been over 100 ‘taskforces’ created since then – but what is a taskforce? HMRC defines this as group comprising enforcement and compliance teams who focus on particular places and sectors for a period of time. These areas for investigation are chosen because there is already evidence of tax fraud and evasion.
The taskforces can implement a range of investigations and scrutinise all records. With their running total of recovered tax payments at £404million, they do seem to work!
A total of 27 new ‘taskforces’ were formed between April and October this year. Their areas of focus included: Retail, Grocery, Hidden Wealth and Income Tax Self-Assessment Repayments. One of these taskforces managed to secure 22 arrests.
What HMRC says about taskforces
The Director General for Enforcement and Compliance at HMRC, Jennie Granger, gave a clear warning to tax cheats within her celebratory speech the UK Tax Investigation Conference:
“The message is clear if you try to cheat on your tax we are going to catch you – it’s only fair that we all pay what we should to fund public services. We have increasing amounts of intelligence, and are using state of the art digital tools to help us to identify and target high risk areas. This yield of £109 million – almost double the figure for the same period in 2014 – shows that our strategy is working.”
