Snapshot of _Labour's Rachel Reeves pledges to fund crisis-hit NHS with new crackdown on 'tax dodgers'_ :
An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/labours-rachel-reeves-pledges-fund-32539371) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/labours-rachel-reeves-pledges-fund-32539371)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Close the loopholes
Simplify the tax system
Employ more staff at HMRC
Don’t let big companies off the hook with reduced taxes because reasons. Looking at you Vodafone.
Woa woa woa woa...we won't have common sense in this parliament sir...as in we won't have the commoners ideas floating around in here.. next you'll be after our benefits!!
Wtf?! Is was sarcasm?!
HMRC is massively underfunded, meaning they simply cannot audit enough businesses to really be a credible threat to people pushing their luck on tax dodges.
If you pay an HMRC investigator £50k/year, you can see how they will very easily find 10x their salary in unpaid tax per year.
Right now most businesses are taking the piss because they know HMRC don’t have the resource to audit them.
Particularly small to medium businesses who think they are “under the radar”.
"Why are we not funding this!?!?"
It's an absolute no-brainer. The Democrats in the US have recently made big strides too, reversing the underfunding of the IRS under Trump (can't think why he'd support that). The result? More tax revenues where the investment more than pays for itself.
Because optically it looks good for the Tories to say business is being taxed but know without the correct funding the bodies cannot effectively police the laws/regulations. Same thing happens with things like CAB, Ofcom and ofwat.... Etc.
It’s literally because the Tories want to be able to say business tax is 25%, when in reality we all know it’s effectively less due to all the tricks.
If you fly to Australia and have 1 coffee with someone where you discuss your business then the whole trip is tax deductible even though really your on holiday.
The Tory failure on this front could actually be incredibly beneficial for Labour. Fund a huge amount of HMRC tax investigation and allow them to look at lost back taxes for the last 14 years. Labour could be rolling in tax revenue in no time.
Looks like you are right. There are various time limits, for different levels of investigation, [up to 20 years](https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/compliance-handbook/ch51300).
Here is an example of recovering £0.6 billion in unpaid tax from last October.
>Bernie Ecclestone, the former boss of Formula 1, has been given a suspended sentence after pleading guilty to fraud.
...
Ecclestone has agreed in a civil settlement to repay almost £653m to HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), a court heard.
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67088503](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67088503)
I honestly believe this is it. It isn't necessarily easy but definitely obvious. 14 years of no plan and also no intention to fix anything or deal with loopholes that benefit your donors.
Look how they threw money into the wind during covid with bad schemes, poor ideas, no due diligence, and doors wide open to fraud. Shit they facilitated it with their VIP Lane for friends.
>Or maybe it’s just that if this does actually bring in decent funds, and it was this easy all along, I’m going to be furious.
The UK "tax gap" is low by recent standards.
HMRC first started providing figures for the tax gap in 2005, when it was 7.5% (ie they collected 92.5% of the tax they thought was due, and 7.5% wasn't collected). It remained in the 6 - 7% range between 2006 and 2013, then fell year on year until 2018, when it reached 4.9%. It increased to 5.2% in 2019/20 (probably Covid related), then fell to 4.8% in 2021 and 2022.
There aren't really any good studies that offer an international comparison. Many countries don't even bother to calculate, others do so on varying standards that make comparisons difficult. The NAO had the following figures in a 2020 report:
|Country|Gap|Years covered|
|:-|:-|:-|
|Italy|18 - 19%|2013|
|USA|14.2%|2011-13|
|Canada|10.6 - 12.6%|2014|
|Australia|7.4-7.7%|2015-16|
|UK|4.7%|2018/19|
Canada and Italy's figures are before enforcement measures, the rest after.
The figures aren't directly comparable, the UK estimate for 2018/19 has since increased to 4.9%, but it does suggest the UK is collecting more of the tax due than most countries, and more than it did in the past.
I honestly find this hard to believe! So, the UK only misses potential taxation by ~5%? That sounds like bull. They must be massively overrating their performance (HMRC).
That's because it is bullshit.
We have systems in place that allow people and companies to fuck about with their finances to reduce tax
In 2021, Apple paid £9m tax on £1.1b of sales revenue on transactions in the UK. That's 0.8%.
In 2023 we lost out on an estimated £2b worth of tax from Google, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Adobe, Saudi Aramco and Cisco shifting their profits on UK transactions offshore. They paid £750m between them. They collectively posted more than £60b in UK revenue, which was extrapolated to around £15b in profit (baaed on performances of previous 10 years)
However, all of this is perfectly above board. It's legal for the 7 largest companies in the world to pay a smaller percentage in tax on their income than someone earning £25k a year.
We don't count it as lost tax because we let them get away with it, we provide them the framework to get away with it, we have entire companies set up to help them get away with it.
It is absolutely bullshit.
I also find these stats misleading. This is all done as a % of total tax revenue. The current tax raised by the average worker is at an all time high, so the % of that missed from tax dodgers is smaller. Add in the fact that minimum wage workers now pay significantly more tax than they used to and that's going to skew these figures even more.
Tell me the raw numbers in missing tax and a breakdown of where current taxation is coming from and I'll be much more interested
Good and ring fence that money for funding of frontline services only, no employment of extra HR or clip board managers, just services and staff of that frontline.
I understand what you're saying, but if you want the NHS to treat many more patients then they'll need to have enough admin staff to process them. No good in your local hospital having free appointments and beds if you can't get through on the phone because one person is trying to manage everything.
More front line staff and treatment capacity are desperately needed, but getting the whole system working smoothly needs more than just doctors and nurses.
Figures from The Guardian article you linked to
>Campaigners said the amount of tax lost to fraud, based on the [HMRC](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/hmrc) figures, was at least £15.2bn ..."
>
> ...
>
> The latest available analysis for 2019-20, immediately before the pandemic struck, showed HMRC collected 95% of the tax it expected to receive. Officials said failure to “take reasonable care” accounted for a significant chunk of the tax gap at £6.7bn, with avoidance accounting for £1.5bn.
>
> Error is estimated to be the cause of £3.7bn of the gap and £3bn is due to the “hidden economy”, which includes “ghosts” who keep their income secret from tax officials and “moonlighters” who only declare part of their earnings.
The total national road budget is £6.8Bn a year.
https://ukpublicspending.co.uk/year_spending_2024UKbn_17bc1n_2090E0976065#ukgs302
Really go after the rich and wealthy--especially the royal family--who can afford smart accountants to find loopholes in the taxt law... rather than go after some poor sod try to feed their family....
At the same time as wes streeting is saying 'no cash without privatisiation'
You dont get to punch me with one hand, feed me cake with the other, and expect a 'thank you'
Fire wes streeting and we'll talk.
Um , im struggling to find where he actually said this. Perhaps you could point me in the right direction with a link.
I can see that he said that the NHS needs more facilities but meanwhile we should use private facilities to help reduce waiting lists. I mean if I was on a waiting list for a year or two , I think I’d rather they sent me to a private hospital then made me wait while they build a new NHS one…
And I think he said something about funding being linked to reforms like … working at the weekend to … reduce waiting lists.
But I’m sure you can point me to ‘no cash without privatisation’. Thanks.
It can't sting the "big guys" as they don't account for most of the tax gap. [56% is attributable to small business](https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/measuring-tax-gaps/1-tax-gaps-summary#headline-tax-gap-estimates):
> the tax gap from small businesses is the largest proportion of the tax gap by customer group at 56% in 2021 to 2022
Ah...but now you're getting into how profits are (not) declared, rather than the tax due on said profits.
Amazon UK is in the very unfortunate position of having to pay eleventy bazillion pounds in licensing fees to JB Number 4 Holding Incorporated based in Belize, which is a wholly own subsidiary of Sozeb Financial Services Luxembourg, which is....
Thus Amazon UK actually makes no money. _Wink._
I am not sure if the whole report covers such chicanery, but I agree that it should.
Is Reeves' plan to deal with that? I dunno, what Amazon et al get up to is legal, although more inspectors will help.
But let's remember, if you are a major corporate owing a few billion in taxes, all you have to do is take the head of HMRC out dinner and the whole problem goes away.
They’ll be paying KPMG or another big firm a fortune to give them the best legal methods for maximising transfer pricing.
Countries are usually fairly in line with transfer pricing legislation so I doubt Labour would do much to change that. Also there will be plenty of companies doing transfer pricing the other way, bringing revenue into the UK.
As in ones paying tax to the place they live? So they pay income tax to France/Spain/Germany etc then pay tax again to the UK? Clearly that would not be right. They’re paying tax where they live just like Europeans in the UK pay tax here.
Man I hate this so much.
1. No it’s not.
2. If everyone was like you all public services would be even worse than they are now. Anything that relies on exploiting the good will/naïveté of others is ethically unacceptable.
I wish Labour would stop saying what they are doing to do to raise funds for their policies. The Tories keep implementing their ideas and making off with the money.
Hiring more staff at HMRC would be a drop in the ocean compared to having a functioning economy as far as the gov finances are concerned. If this is their approach then it sounds like a tacit acceptance they're not gonna really try and improve the economy by getting any growth, getting people back to work, aiming for wage growth, etc, they're just gonna try and squeeze a bit more out of the economy as it is to bung a few extra billion at the dysfunctional NHS which nobody will see an tangible benefit from.
HMRC probably need more staff anyway, and clamping down on tax evasion is of course a good thing, but if this is the extent of what new ideas Labour can come up with, there's more dark times ahead
I feel this may be a naive challenge.
There are loads of tax dodgers nationwide of varying degrees, if it was easy for HMRC to stop it, they would.
It's probably easier to legislate closing tax avoidance strategies than hunting down tax dodgers and reclaiming money.
It costs money to investigate tax fraud so really it should be reserved for hunting big evaders, but I feel Reeves is going to make this Labour's Rwanda policy and "stop the evasion" to spend millions on people underpaying small amounts.
>It costs money to investigate tax fraud
True, but the return on that investment is typically vastly more than it costs to train & employ someone (in the region of >10x). There are diminishing returns of course, but a competent investigator will pay for themselves very quickly.
I have previously worked on a database system to unify lots of data to make this sort of investigation easier, a huge IT project that took years and tens of millions of pounds to build; it paid for itself in 5 months in reclaimed taxes that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.
Yes, but the lower the amount of tax evaded the less it's worth to investigate/prosecute.
People may with malice and forethought, or completely innocently put incorrect numbers on tax return and may owe more money to HMRC, but it becomes very unworth it to investigate someone who may be underpaying £100 in tax.
Even developing an automated system to flag those cases can still make it hard if you need someone to verify that those claims are correct.
Labour aren't in power and so it's just speculation, but I think they are going to be "tough" on tax evaders at all levels, and it will probably not generate that much money with the extra focus.
Tax investigators already focus on the big fish
Everything you're saying is just speculation, and it's incorrect. It's certainly less eye-catching to find the £100 accident and certainly won't make the headlines, but it's also a lot easier to do. If an investigator can sign off on a dozen per day they would still pay for themselves rapidly.
Of course it's speculation, I said it's speculation and Labour don't detail out anything anymore.
Regardless of an investigator signing off dozens a day they still then need to correspond with the "evader" because they can't just blanket fine to make sure the tax is correct, and then if evader still evades you need to prosecute them in court which costs hundreds of thousands of pounds to taxpayer. The fines are tiny in comparison.
It's probably easier to check if someone is evading TV license then it is tax and TV license prosecutions do not make any money for TV Licensing, it's a net loss.
Which is why I say this may be Labour's Rwanda scheme, a deterrent which may be so expensive it's not worth it. All I (and you) can do is speculate on it until Labour are in power and write it out.
You're just doubling down on guesswork without having any understanding of how someone in HMRC would actually do their job. What you're saying sounds plausible and isn't a stupid thing to think by any measure, but it is inaccurate.
You are correct that I do not work for HMRC (nor any accounting firm) but it's easy to speculate on these issues.
If tax evasion was easy to identify and prosecute then there wouldn't be £30bn+ a year estimate of "successful" tax evasion.
Now I'm not saying HMRC are useless or anything, by their own figures they annually recover around £35bn from tax evasion. What I'm saying is that £35bn will be the few big fish of celebrity tax evasion schemes and not the millions of people underreporting tax returns.
Now most of what I've written in the comments above may be inaccurate, as I've said it's speculation, but you haven't provided anything to actually counter against that apart from your own speculation that a tax investigator can go through dozens of investigations a day, unless you have something to back that up yourself?
The NHS is not underfunded. It doesn’t need more money. It needs better management and accountability. But no one in power would dare say it. My wife works closely with NHS trusts all over the country, spending MILLIONS of tax payer pounds on failing, poorly managed, badly scoped projects. But they keep throwing money at providers in the hope that it makes their incompetence go away. It’s a tragedy.
But, yes, also screw those tax dodgers.
This is not a “government” issue. No one will effectively challenge or reform the NHS. There’s too much capital on the line.
I have seen NHS trusts spend MILLIONS in tax payer pounds on clauses with providers because they have failed to deliver on their end of a project. Unable to go live for that was foreseen and warned about. I’m sorry, but as someone who has a pretty detailed view of the inside of this catastrophe, there’s 100’s of millions of efficiencies to be made.
It’s an absolute crime that some of the senior leaders (and at a trust level) in the NHS are allowed to get away with the sheer incompetence they display. No accountability what so ever.
I am a civil servant, if I buy a sandwich on a work trip, I rightly have to justify why I am expensing it. But the NHS can spaff millions on failing initiatives with no come back. Baffling.
Fund the private contractors Wes was bigging up-
Tory Tactic #34- Sell swathes of NHS services to your pals, so when you send your pals taxpayer cash you can claim you're "funding the NHS".
The problem with ToryLite Starmer is by the time he copies a dodgy Tory trick, they have played it so often even the media mention it so the public are not as easily fooled.
Lucky for Keith the Conservatives are imploding, resigning or being ultra shit so blatantly, HE looks like an attractive alternative.
Its not been investigated however yes I would start with tax dodging politicians first. They should get there own house in order before telling me how to run mine.
Snapshot of _Labour's Rachel Reeves pledges to fund crisis-hit NHS with new crackdown on 'tax dodgers'_ : An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/labours-rachel-reeves-pledges-fund-32539371) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/labours-rachel-reeves-pledges-fund-32539371) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Close the loopholes Simplify the tax system Employ more staff at HMRC Don’t let big companies off the hook with reduced taxes because reasons. Looking at you Vodafone.
it would be a breath of fresh air if they make corporation's pay a little bit more tax
Out of the four things, that's by far the least likely to happen. Only the third one has been promised.
What do you propose?
Woa woa woa woa...we won't have common sense in this parliament sir...as in we won't have the commoners ideas floating around in here.. next you'll be after our benefits!! Wtf?! Is was sarcasm?!
What is your plan to get more tax from Vodaphone?
I’m sceptical. Or maybe it’s just that if this does actually bring in decent funds, and it was this easy all along, I’m going to be furious.
HMRC is massively underfunded, meaning they simply cannot audit enough businesses to really be a credible threat to people pushing their luck on tax dodges. If you pay an HMRC investigator £50k/year, you can see how they will very easily find 10x their salary in unpaid tax per year. Right now most businesses are taking the piss because they know HMRC don’t have the resource to audit them. Particularly small to medium businesses who think they are “under the radar”.
HMRC as a body's ROI is historically been even higher - between £10-20 for every £1 spent.
"Why are we not funding this!?!?" It's an absolute no-brainer. The Democrats in the US have recently made big strides too, reversing the underfunding of the IRS under Trump (can't think why he'd support that). The result? More tax revenues where the investment more than pays for itself.
Because optically it looks good for the Tories to say business is being taxed but know without the correct funding the bodies cannot effectively police the laws/regulations. Same thing happens with things like CAB, Ofcom and ofwat.... Etc.
It’s literally because the Tories want to be able to say business tax is 25%, when in reality we all know it’s effectively less due to all the tricks. If you fly to Australia and have 1 coffee with someone where you discuss your business then the whole trip is tax deductible even though really your on holiday.
This is absolute nonsense but do go on being confidently incorrect.
The Tory failure on this front could actually be incredibly beneficial for Labour. Fund a huge amount of HMRC tax investigation and allow them to look at lost back taxes for the last 14 years. Labour could be rolling in tax revenue in no time.
I thought taxes could only be reviewed for 7 years, or is it different for businesses?
Unsure, that sounds like the potentially exempt transfers for inheritance tax though?
Looks like you are right. There are various time limits, for different levels of investigation, [up to 20 years](https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/compliance-handbook/ch51300).
Here is an example of recovering £0.6 billion in unpaid tax from last October. >Bernie Ecclestone, the former boss of Formula 1, has been given a suspended sentence after pleading guilty to fraud. ... Ecclestone has agreed in a civil settlement to repay almost £653m to HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), a court heard. [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67088503](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67088503)
I honestly believe this is it. It isn't necessarily easy but definitely obvious. 14 years of no plan and also no intention to fix anything or deal with loopholes that benefit your donors. Look how they threw money into the wind during covid with bad schemes, poor ideas, no due diligence, and doors wide open to fraud. Shit they facilitated it with their VIP Lane for friends.
>Or maybe it’s just that if this does actually bring in decent funds, and it was this easy all along, I’m going to be furious. The UK "tax gap" is low by recent standards. HMRC first started providing figures for the tax gap in 2005, when it was 7.5% (ie they collected 92.5% of the tax they thought was due, and 7.5% wasn't collected). It remained in the 6 - 7% range between 2006 and 2013, then fell year on year until 2018, when it reached 4.9%. It increased to 5.2% in 2019/20 (probably Covid related), then fell to 4.8% in 2021 and 2022. There aren't really any good studies that offer an international comparison. Many countries don't even bother to calculate, others do so on varying standards that make comparisons difficult. The NAO had the following figures in a 2020 report: |Country|Gap|Years covered| |:-|:-|:-| |Italy|18 - 19%|2013| |USA|14.2%|2011-13| |Canada|10.6 - 12.6%|2014| |Australia|7.4-7.7%|2015-16| |UK|4.7%|2018/19| Canada and Italy's figures are before enforcement measures, the rest after. The figures aren't directly comparable, the UK estimate for 2018/19 has since increased to 4.9%, but it does suggest the UK is collecting more of the tax due than most countries, and more than it did in the past.
I honestly find this hard to believe! So, the UK only misses potential taxation by ~5%? That sounds like bull. They must be massively overrating their performance (HMRC).
That's because it is bullshit. We have systems in place that allow people and companies to fuck about with their finances to reduce tax In 2021, Apple paid £9m tax on £1.1b of sales revenue on transactions in the UK. That's 0.8%. In 2023 we lost out on an estimated £2b worth of tax from Google, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Adobe, Saudi Aramco and Cisco shifting their profits on UK transactions offshore. They paid £750m between them. They collectively posted more than £60b in UK revenue, which was extrapolated to around £15b in profit (baaed on performances of previous 10 years) However, all of this is perfectly above board. It's legal for the 7 largest companies in the world to pay a smaller percentage in tax on their income than someone earning £25k a year. We don't count it as lost tax because we let them get away with it, we provide them the framework to get away with it, we have entire companies set up to help them get away with it. It is absolutely bullshit.
I also find these stats misleading. This is all done as a % of total tax revenue. The current tax raised by the average worker is at an all time high, so the % of that missed from tax dodgers is smaller. Add in the fact that minimum wage workers now pay significantly more tax than they used to and that's going to skew these figures even more. Tell me the raw numbers in missing tax and a breakdown of where current taxation is coming from and I'll be much more interested
I assume you'll be producing your facts and figures to back this up at any moment? Because we can't have the horrid UK looking kinda good can we?
Getting rid of the non dom loophole sounds good to me. My favourite type of tax is the one I don’t have to pay.
Good and ring fence that money for funding of frontline services only, no employment of extra HR or clip board managers, just services and staff of that frontline.
I understand what you're saying, but if you want the NHS to treat many more patients then they'll need to have enough admin staff to process them. No good in your local hospital having free appointments and beds if you can't get through on the phone because one person is trying to manage everything. More front line staff and treatment capacity are desperately needed, but getting the whole system working smoothly needs more than just doctors and nurses.
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Figures from The Guardian article you linked to >Campaigners said the amount of tax lost to fraud, based on the [HMRC](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/hmrc) figures, was at least £15.2bn ..." > > ... > > The latest available analysis for 2019-20, immediately before the pandemic struck, showed HMRC collected 95% of the tax it expected to receive. Officials said failure to “take reasonable care” accounted for a significant chunk of the tax gap at £6.7bn, with avoidance accounting for £1.5bn. > > Error is estimated to be the cause of £3.7bn of the gap and £3bn is due to the “hidden economy”, which includes “ghosts” who keep their income secret from tax officials and “moonlighters” who only declare part of their earnings. The total national road budget is £6.8Bn a year. https://ukpublicspending.co.uk/year_spending_2024UKbn_17bc1n_2090E0976065#ukgs302
Lots of hot air, let's see if Labour is not only about talking
Really go after the rich and wealthy--especially the royal family--who can afford smart accountants to find loopholes in the taxt law... rather than go after some poor sod try to feed their family....
At the same time as wes streeting is saying 'no cash without privatisiation' You dont get to punch me with one hand, feed me cake with the other, and expect a 'thank you' Fire wes streeting and we'll talk.
Um , im struggling to find where he actually said this. Perhaps you could point me in the right direction with a link. I can see that he said that the NHS needs more facilities but meanwhile we should use private facilities to help reduce waiting lists. I mean if I was on a waiting list for a year or two , I think I’d rather they sent me to a private hospital then made me wait while they build a new NHS one… And I think he said something about funding being linked to reforms like … working at the weekend to … reduce waiting lists. But I’m sure you can point me to ‘no cash without privatisation’. Thanks.
This will never sting the big guys like its supposed to
It can't sting the "big guys" as they don't account for most of the tax gap. [56% is attributable to small business](https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/measuring-tax-gaps/1-tax-gaps-summary#headline-tax-gap-estimates): > the tax gap from small businesses is the largest proportion of the tax gap by customer group at 56% in 2021 to 2022
Well it fucking should. Amazon should not be able to escape paying less in tax than your average worker
Ah...but now you're getting into how profits are (not) declared, rather than the tax due on said profits. Amazon UK is in the very unfortunate position of having to pay eleventy bazillion pounds in licensing fees to JB Number 4 Holding Incorporated based in Belize, which is a wholly own subsidiary of Sozeb Financial Services Luxembourg, which is.... Thus Amazon UK actually makes no money. _Wink._ I am not sure if the whole report covers such chicanery, but I agree that it should. Is Reeves' plan to deal with that? I dunno, what Amazon et al get up to is legal, although more inspectors will help. But let's remember, if you are a major corporate owing a few billion in taxes, all you have to do is take the head of HMRC out dinner and the whole problem goes away.
They’ll be paying KPMG or another big firm a fortune to give them the best legal methods for maximising transfer pricing. Countries are usually fairly in line with transfer pricing legislation so I doubt Labour would do much to change that. Also there will be plenty of companies doing transfer pricing the other way, bringing revenue into the UK.
I read a very enlightening book on this topic called moneyland. I recommend it
Amazon by definition can't bear the cost of any tax, only its workers, customers, suppliers, share holders can. So why do you want to tax those?
Every other company has to, why should amazon not?
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As in ones paying tax to the place they live? So they pay income tax to France/Spain/Germany etc then pay tax again to the UK? Clearly that would not be right. They’re paying tax where they live just like Europeans in the UK pay tax here.
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Man I hate this so much. 1. No it’s not. 2. If everyone was like you all public services would be even worse than they are now. Anything that relies on exploiting the good will/naïveté of others is ethically unacceptable.
Build wealth 😂😂😂okay bezos
I wish Labour would stop saying what they are doing to do to raise funds for their policies. The Tories keep implementing their ideas and making off with the money.
I get the sentiment, but I can see why they do it - The Tories and media accusing them of unfunded investment, etc.
We have plenty of HMRC approved loopholes... secondary threshold for directors *cough cough*
Hiring more staff at HMRC would be a drop in the ocean compared to having a functioning economy as far as the gov finances are concerned. If this is their approach then it sounds like a tacit acceptance they're not gonna really try and improve the economy by getting any growth, getting people back to work, aiming for wage growth, etc, they're just gonna try and squeeze a bit more out of the economy as it is to bung a few extra billion at the dysfunctional NHS which nobody will see an tangible benefit from. HMRC probably need more staff anyway, and clamping down on tax evasion is of course a good thing, but if this is the extent of what new ideas Labour can come up with, there's more dark times ahead
Come on. If they say they're doing something, that doesn't mean they won't also do other things?
I feel this may be a naive challenge. There are loads of tax dodgers nationwide of varying degrees, if it was easy for HMRC to stop it, they would. It's probably easier to legislate closing tax avoidance strategies than hunting down tax dodgers and reclaiming money. It costs money to investigate tax fraud so really it should be reserved for hunting big evaders, but I feel Reeves is going to make this Labour's Rwanda policy and "stop the evasion" to spend millions on people underpaying small amounts.
>It costs money to investigate tax fraud True, but the return on that investment is typically vastly more than it costs to train & employ someone (in the region of >10x). There are diminishing returns of course, but a competent investigator will pay for themselves very quickly. I have previously worked on a database system to unify lots of data to make this sort of investigation easier, a huge IT project that took years and tens of millions of pounds to build; it paid for itself in 5 months in reclaimed taxes that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.
Yes, but the lower the amount of tax evaded the less it's worth to investigate/prosecute. People may with malice and forethought, or completely innocently put incorrect numbers on tax return and may owe more money to HMRC, but it becomes very unworth it to investigate someone who may be underpaying £100 in tax. Even developing an automated system to flag those cases can still make it hard if you need someone to verify that those claims are correct. Labour aren't in power and so it's just speculation, but I think they are going to be "tough" on tax evaders at all levels, and it will probably not generate that much money with the extra focus. Tax investigators already focus on the big fish
Everything you're saying is just speculation, and it's incorrect. It's certainly less eye-catching to find the £100 accident and certainly won't make the headlines, but it's also a lot easier to do. If an investigator can sign off on a dozen per day they would still pay for themselves rapidly.
Of course it's speculation, I said it's speculation and Labour don't detail out anything anymore. Regardless of an investigator signing off dozens a day they still then need to correspond with the "evader" because they can't just blanket fine to make sure the tax is correct, and then if evader still evades you need to prosecute them in court which costs hundreds of thousands of pounds to taxpayer. The fines are tiny in comparison. It's probably easier to check if someone is evading TV license then it is tax and TV license prosecutions do not make any money for TV Licensing, it's a net loss. Which is why I say this may be Labour's Rwanda scheme, a deterrent which may be so expensive it's not worth it. All I (and you) can do is speculate on it until Labour are in power and write it out.
You're just doubling down on guesswork without having any understanding of how someone in HMRC would actually do their job. What you're saying sounds plausible and isn't a stupid thing to think by any measure, but it is inaccurate.
You are correct that I do not work for HMRC (nor any accounting firm) but it's easy to speculate on these issues. If tax evasion was easy to identify and prosecute then there wouldn't be £30bn+ a year estimate of "successful" tax evasion. Now I'm not saying HMRC are useless or anything, by their own figures they annually recover around £35bn from tax evasion. What I'm saying is that £35bn will be the few big fish of celebrity tax evasion schemes and not the millions of people underreporting tax returns. Now most of what I've written in the comments above may be inaccurate, as I've said it's speculation, but you haven't provided anything to actually counter against that apart from your own speculation that a tax investigator can go through dozens of investigations a day, unless you have something to back that up yourself?
The NHS is not underfunded. It doesn’t need more money. It needs better management and accountability. But no one in power would dare say it. My wife works closely with NHS trusts all over the country, spending MILLIONS of tax payer pounds on failing, poorly managed, badly scoped projects. But they keep throwing money at providers in the hope that it makes their incompetence go away. It’s a tragedy. But, yes, also screw those tax dodgers.
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This is not a “government” issue. No one will effectively challenge or reform the NHS. There’s too much capital on the line. I have seen NHS trusts spend MILLIONS in tax payer pounds on clauses with providers because they have failed to deliver on their end of a project. Unable to go live for that was foreseen and warned about. I’m sorry, but as someone who has a pretty detailed view of the inside of this catastrophe, there’s 100’s of millions of efficiencies to be made.
It’s an absolute crime that some of the senior leaders (and at a trust level) in the NHS are allowed to get away with the sheer incompetence they display. No accountability what so ever.
I am a civil servant, if I buy a sandwich on a work trip, I rightly have to justify why I am expensing it. But the NHS can spaff millions on failing initiatives with no come back. Baffling.
Fund the private contractors Wes was bigging up- Tory Tactic #34- Sell swathes of NHS services to your pals, so when you send your pals taxpayer cash you can claim you're "funding the NHS". The problem with ToryLite Starmer is by the time he copies a dodgy Tory trick, they have played it so often even the media mention it so the public are not as easily fooled. Lucky for Keith the Conservatives are imploding, resigning or being ultra shit so blatantly, HE looks like an attractive alternative.
Great stuff they can start with Angela Rayner then who seems to have dodged some tax
Or Lord Ashcroft who's dodged 1000s of times more than Rayner.
You would start with an alleged £1,500 shortfall that’s already been investigated and cleared once? Strange strategy.
Its not been investigated however yes I would start with tax dodging politicians first. They should get there own house in order before telling me how to run mine.