This week STEP hosted a seminar to update members on HMRC’s latest moves to tackle tax evasion and avoidance.
Entitled, ‘An essential update on HMRC’s activity to tackle tax evasion and avoidance, including information exchange, new powers and its impact on professional advisors,’ the seminar took place at BDO LLP’s office in London. Speakers included John Shuker from the HMRC International & Offshore Evasion Team, and Dawn Register TEP of BDO LLP.
The introduction of the Common Reporting Standard (CRS) this year follows a raft of governmental efforts including the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) and the EU Directive 2003/48/EC (the EU Savings Directive) to improve cross-border tax compliance. The Offshore Evasion Team has focused on clamping down on UK tax evaders, in particular:
• Moving UK gains, income or assets offshore to conceal them from HMRC
• Not declaring taxable income from overseas, or taxable assets kept overseas
• Using complex offshore structures to hide beneficial ownership of assets.
The tax gap for 2014-2015 is estimated to be GBP36 billion, with GBP 5.2 billion attributed to tax evasion.
HMRC launched the campaign ‘No Safe Havens’ in 2013 with the objective of ensuring that there are no jurisdictions where UK taxpayers can hide their income and assets. It also implemented a number of disclosure facilities to give people the incentive to come forward and pay tax voluntarily, before they are detected and sanctioned.
In the last two years, HMRC has vigorously escalated its tax evasion strategy. The Worldwide Disclosure Facility opened last September, in addition to a new requirement for all financial institutions and tax advisers to notify their customers about new automatic exchange of information agreements.
The following further measures are due to be implemented in 2017:
Corporate Criminal Offences of Failure to Prevent Facilitation of Evasion
This will apply to corporations who fail to prevent their agents from criminally facilitating tax evasion (facilitating evasion is already considered a criminal offence). The offences will apply to domestic or overseas corporations whose agents facilitate the evasion of UK taxes, or a domestic corporation which facilitates the evasion of tax overseas.
Tackling Offshore Tax Evasion: A Requirement to Correct
Taxpayers will be obliged to disclose any outstanding UK tax related to offshore investments or assets, or face ‘failure to correct’ penalties. These penalties will be significantly higher than for those who voluntarily put their affairs in order, and will be a minimum of 100%.
STEP’s Technical Committee has submitted responses to a variety of HMRC’s consultation papers relating to tax evasion below:
The STEP Blog 