Tax Whistle-blowers
24th July 2015Tax Dodgers Beware: HMRC makes record payments to informants.
Our Fee Protection insurers report that HMRC made payments of £605,000 to informants in the year to March, up 50% on the previous year. Around 100,000 calls were made to HMRC’s confidential telephone hotline over the last year.
Finding sufficient supporting information to justify following up informants’ reports will have been made easier by HMRC’s recent investment in its multi-million pound database system, Connect, which gathers real time date from numerous public and private sources.
The increased payments to informants reflects the fact that Connect enables HMRC to scrutinise a wider range of taxpayers – not just high net worth individuals and cash-in-hand businesses.
Our Fee Protection insurance helps us protect clients from the costs of a tax enquiry.
Disclaimer - All information in this post was correct at time of writing.
