Do Tax Amnesties Work?

As part of the government’s £917 million spending review investment to tackle tax evasion, avoidance and fraud, HMRC set up a task force initiative to target high risk sectors.

Each specialist team carries out an intensive campaign with a view to uncovering tax owed but not disclosed to the Revenue. HMRC's campaigns provide opportunities for people to voluntarily put their tax affairs in order. They do this by identifying a group to target and gathering information and intelligence that can be used to encourage and influence that group to make a disclosure. Once a campaign closes, HMRC then uses that same information and intelligence to follow up action that can include criminal investigations, aimed at those who choose evasion.

HMRC state that campaigns launched so far have produced a yield of nearly £510 million from voluntary disclosures and over £120 million from non-compliance follow up from a large number of civil interventions, including over 18,000 completed investigations. There are also just over 20 criminal cases in progress.

Before the recent spate of campaigns HMRC offered offshore tax amnesties in 2007 and 2009 which raised a combined tax yield of over £500 million.

Accountingweb recently published a table monitoring the progress of all campaigns to date which is reproduced below:

According to the table therefore a total tax gain of approximately £37 million has been yielded from campaigns to date. It is uncertain how the tax gain has been measured but nevertheless there is a disparity between these and HMRC's claims.

The target is to raise an additional £7 billion each year by 2014/15 so there is still work to be done.