accountancy and have a survey running until 18 December 2013.
Tax evasion and illicit trade
The government has made unprecedented progress working internationally to tackle offshore evasion. It has expanded the network of jurisdictions with which it automatically exchanges information to tackle offshore tax evasion, most recently through the ground breaking agreements signed with the Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories – namely the Isle of Man, Guernsey, Jersey, the Cayman Islands, Gibraltar, Bermuda, Montserrat, the Turks and Caicos Islands and the British Virgin Islands. The UK has entered into agreements with Switzerland and the Crown Dependencies to recover significant amounts of previously unpaid UK tax. The UK-Swiss Agreement is now expected to secure a total of £1.9 billion over the forecast period. This is less than originally forecast and the government is working closely with the Swiss authorities to ensure the agreement is being fully and properly implemented. The agreement has, however, already yielded the Exchequer almost £800 million in unpaid tax which would not otherwise have been received. The government is taking wide-ranging action to reduce fraud, error and debt in the tax and benefits systems and will invest an extra £140 million to ensure that everyone pays what they should (Real Time Information?), and to reduce the amount of debt owed to government. Autumn Statement 2013 announced that the government will: stop tax credit payments during the year where, due to a change of circumstance, a claimant has already received their full annual entitlement – this will prevent claimants building up overpayments that must be repaid at a later stage maintain more regular contact with pensioners living abroad, to reduce overpayments in the state pension system that arise when a death goes unreported work in partnership with a private sector provider to carry out fraud and error checks to prevent money being paid out to tax credit claimants erroneously. Also undertake more data matching across the benefits and tax systems to spot benefit claimants with undeclared income and investigate these cases swiftly implement a Single Fraud Investigation Service to investigate fraud across the whole of the welfare system increase the use of private sector debt collection services to enable DWP and HMRC to expand their capacity to recover benefit and tax credit debts expand HMRC’s capacity to collect additional tax debt that has gone repeatedly unpaid. Fraud, error and debt in the tax and benefits systems
Further details on all these measures are due to be announced shortly.
Other items of interest
Help for small businesses HMRC want dealing with tax to be as simple and straightforward as possible, so giving small businesses greater confidence and certainty.
CIPP Policy News Journal
16/04/2014, Page 34 of 519
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker