HMRC’s Affluent Unit is to hire 100 additional staff and target people with assets of more than £1m, instead of £2.5m as previously announced. ‘We will use IT software to look across files and records and work out features in someone’s affairs that suggest there’s avoidance going on. They will look at anomalies and sniff out any problems,’ Danny Alexander, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, told the Mail on Sunday at the start of the Liberal Democrats’ Brighton conference.
George Osborne gave the government announcement to the Liberal Democrats, The Times reported, allowing the Lib Dems to ‘kick off their conference with a mixture of measures and rhetoric aimed at the rich’.
The announcement did not go far enough, said the Association of Revenue and Customs (ARC), representing senior HMRC staff. ‘ARC understands that £5m will be made available to fund this initiative, in expectation of a return of at least 15 times that amount,’ it said.
ARC President Gareth Hills said: ‘ARC welcomes measures to tackle avoidance and close the tax gap, but … we have told the government that it needs to invest more in HMRC. We have told it that senior professionals bring in 30 times their cost. And we have shown how an investment of £260m in HMRC would recoup £6bn in tax currently lost. It’s time for the government to listen to us. It’s time to be bold and properly invest in HMRC.’
Alexander announced the creation of the Affluent Unit at the Liberal Democrats’ September 2011 conference. HMRC said a month later that the new ‘affluent team’ had started work. ‘Wealthy tax cheats with overseas property are now being targeted by a new 200-strong team of investigators and specialists,’ it declared in a press release. Jonathan Levy, a Partner at RPC, noted ‘significant differences’ between the new unit and HMRC High New Worth Unit (HNWU). ‘HMRC's stated view of the ultra-high net worth individuals targeted by HNWU is couched in very collaborative language,’ Levy wrote in Tax Journal (18 November 2011).
The HNWU’s stated aims are to ‘build relationships to better understand these customers and make it easier for them to pay the right amount of tax [and] tailor service delivery for these customers through proactive engagement and provide a single point of contact and a holistic approach to their tax affairs’.
Minutes of the June 2012 meeting of the HNWU External Stakeholder Forum recorded that forum members asked HMRC whether the Affluent Unit was ‘now in existence’. The ‘affluent teams’ were now up and running, HMRC said, and had been set up ‘to address specific risks through intervention on cases from a population of approximately 350,000 self-assessment customers with a net worth between approximately £2.5m and £20m.
Michael White, assistant editor at The Guardian, noted yesterday that Alexander had ‘persuaded the normally hard-hearted Mail On Sunday that hiring a few more tax inspectors for the [affluent unit] amounts to a big attack on tax dodging’.
HMRC’s Affluent Unit is to hire 100 additional staff and target people with assets of more than £1m, instead of £2.5m as previously announced. ‘We will use IT software to look across files and records and work out features in someone’s affairs that suggest there’s avoidance going on. They will look at anomalies and sniff out any problems,’ Danny Alexander, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, told the Mail on Sunday at the start of the Liberal Democrats’ Brighton conference.
George Osborne gave the government announcement to the Liberal Democrats, The Times reported, allowing the Lib Dems to ‘kick off their conference with a mixture of measures and rhetoric aimed at the rich’.
The announcement did not go far enough, said the Association of Revenue and Customs (ARC), representing senior HMRC staff. ‘ARC understands that £5m will be made available to fund this initiative, in expectation of a return of at least 15 times that amount,’ it said.
ARC President Gareth Hills said: ‘ARC welcomes measures to tackle avoidance and close the tax gap, but … we have told the government that it needs to invest more in HMRC. We have told it that senior professionals bring in 30 times their cost. And we have shown how an investment of £260m in HMRC would recoup £6bn in tax currently lost. It’s time for the government to listen to us. It’s time to be bold and properly invest in HMRC.’
Alexander announced the creation of the Affluent Unit at the Liberal Democrats’ September 2011 conference. HMRC said a month later that the new ‘affluent team’ had started work. ‘Wealthy tax cheats with overseas property are now being targeted by a new 200-strong team of investigators and specialists,’ it declared in a press release. Jonathan Levy, a Partner at RPC, noted ‘significant differences’ between the new unit and HMRC High New Worth Unit (HNWU). ‘HMRC's stated view of the ultra-high net worth individuals targeted by HNWU is couched in very collaborative language,’ Levy wrote in Tax Journal (18 November 2011).
The HNWU’s stated aims are to ‘build relationships to better understand these customers and make it easier for them to pay the right amount of tax [and] tailor service delivery for these customers through proactive engagement and provide a single point of contact and a holistic approach to their tax affairs’.
Minutes of the June 2012 meeting of the HNWU External Stakeholder Forum recorded that forum members asked HMRC whether the Affluent Unit was ‘now in existence’. The ‘affluent teams’ were now up and running, HMRC said, and had been set up ‘to address specific risks through intervention on cases from a population of approximately 350,000 self-assessment customers with a net worth between approximately £2.5m and £20m.
Michael White, assistant editor at The Guardian, noted yesterday that Alexander had ‘persuaded the normally hard-hearted Mail On Sunday that hiring a few more tax inspectors for the [affluent unit] amounts to a big attack on tax dodging’.
