David Gauke, Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, said that to remove any doubt about a tax avoidance scheme's effectiveness, legislation had been changed in relation to the following numbers of disclosed schemes since 2005:
Estimating the tax gap provides an important tool in understanding the causes of non-compliance and helping HMRC to focus on ways of reducing it, Dave Hartnett told the Treasury Sub-Committee yesterday.
More than £25 billion of tax was ‘under consideration’ in HMRC’s Large Business Service (LBS) enquiries at 31 March 2011, but the department emphasised that the estimate did not represent tax owed or unpaid.
Most large business ‘customers’ of HMRC continue to be satisfied with the overall service provided by the department, according to a survey conducted late last year and published last week on HMRC’s website.
Proposals to counter the marketing and use of ‘high risk’ tax avoidance schemes – still used by a small but significant number of taxpayers, according to HMRC – are set out in a new consultation document.
The government’s efforts to tackle tax avoidance are ‘quite understandable’ but evasion and other criminal activity have a ‘far greater’ impact than legal avoidance, tax experts said in response to a new paper setting out the government’s anti-avoidance strategy.
An ‘aggressive’ tax avoidance scheme putting ‘hundreds of millions of pounds’ of tax at risk was blocked with effect from 9 March in response to a disclosure made to HMRC under the scheme disclosure regulations.
The public will not wear the ‘overly aggressive pursuit of lower tax bills’, David Gauke told the Hundred Group of finance directors in a recent speech.
Businesses should consider engaging ‘more forthrightly’ in the tax avoidance debate to address ‘some of the myths and confusion that exist’, David Gauke said today.
Deferred bonus arrangements meeting certain conditions are to be excluded from proposed measures to tackle income tax and NIC avoidance by means of ‘disguised remuneration’.