HMRC taskforces unearth £109 million in six months
Revenue Taskforces bring together various HMRC compliance and enforcement teams for intensive bursts of activity targeted at specific sectors and locations where there is evidence of high risk of tax evasion and fraud. The teams visit traders to examine their records and carry out other investigations.
They were first launched in spring 2011 and since then some 100 taskforces have raised an additional £404 million in tax.
In the last six months taskforces have brought in £109 million, with £64.9 million recovered in the first three months of this year, more than double the figure for the same period in 2014.
Between April – October 2015, HMRC launched 27 new taskforces targeting sectors that are at the highest risk of tax fraud, including Income Tax Self Assessment Repayments, Retail, Hidden Wealth and Grocery sectors, with one taskforce alone generating 22 arrests.
Speaking at the recent UK Tax Investigation Conference , Jennie Granger, Director General for Enforcement and Compliance at HMRC, said:
“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.”
We are assuming here that it is the revenues money which it blatantly isn’t. the money in fact belongs to the company or person that earned it not the revenue the fact that we have a bunch of gangsters demanding money of people with the force of the gangster’s law behind them is neither here or there. The Gangsters on the other hand are proclaiming to provide services (which most of us don’t use) but are forced to pay for. notwithstanding that people are busy paying their bills mortgages raising their families. morally the argument for taxation is more or less defunct and the constant bullying of the population by the Few must desist.