Tax campaigners have called for the ‘immediate cancellation’ of the UK government’s tax agreement with Switzerland. The Tax Justice Network published details of ten ‘escape routes’ in the agreement, which is designed to tackle evasion by British residents using secret Swiss bank acccounts.
‘The PAYE story is a better one than when we looked at it six months ago and we welcome that – it is a better place to be in,’ the Chairman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee told David Hartnett, HMRC’s Permanent Secretary for Tax, on 17 October.
HMRC is seeking views on a possible change to the PAYE system to allow closely connected employers to be treated as a single entity for PAYE purposes.
HMRC’s top tax official has written to MPs setting out the department’s view of the law surrounding the disclosure of taxpayer information to a Parliamentary committee.
Helen Lethaby reviews the latest developments, including anti-avoidance concerning manufactured overseas dividends.
The government has set out the number of cases prosecuted for income tax, corporation tax, VAT and excise evasion since 2006/07:
The National Audit Office is to ‘examine the reasonableness’ of some of the larger tax settlements reached by HMRC and report in confidence to MPs.
HMRC’s new Offshore Co-ordination Unit is to write to UK residents and organisations holding bank accounts with HSBC in Geneva who may have undisclosed tax liabilties.
HMRC’s top tax official told MPs yesterday that he was very sorry that HMRC made a ‘mistake’ resulting in no interest being charged on national insurance contributions payable by Goldman Sachs following the failure of an avoidance scheme.