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Billion of taxes are uncollected.

 Billions of pounds in tax should be collected because almost 2,300 HM Revenue & Customs compliance staff have been transferred to work on Brexit and Covid-19 schemes.

Victoria Atkins, Treasury minister, acknowledged in response to ministerial questions that 1,043 HMRC tax compliance staff were assigned to Brexit cases in the 2021-22 tax year. An additional 1,250 team, typically working on recovering unpaid taxes, had been moved to Covid-19 loan schemes, which have been subject to fraud.

Sarah Olney, Lib Dem treasury spokesperson, said transferring about 10 per cent of HMRC tax compliance officers to Brexit and Covid duties came at a cost to the country’s public services.

Atkins revealed that £30.7bn had been recovered through compliance efforts in 2021-22 compared with £36.9bn in 2019-20, the year before the pandemic fully hit, a fall of over £6bn.

«This Conservative government is in non-stop firefighting mode because of their gross incompetence, from the botched EU trade deal to the unforgivable mistakes made during the pandemic,» Olney said.

«The National Audit Office has recognised that HMRC’s compliance work provides good value to the taxpayer».

John Cullinane, director of public policy at the Chartered Institute of Taxation, said Brexit had added «significantly» to tax authorities’ workload.

«Brexit, Covid and the war in Ukraine have required HMRC to reallocate people from their existing work, leaving other areas badly stretched,» he said.

«These things came on top of long-running tendencies for governments to introduce tax policy changes tending to lengthen the tax code and complicate the system».

www.sba.tax

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Comments

  1. Andrea17 January 2023 at 09:53

    HMRC is stretched thin right now and as such won't be able to do as much as they did in previous years. As the government needs more money they should hire more people in such important areas.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Liam17 January 2023 at 11:04

      More people should have been hired from the start and not take people from HMRC and move them to other areas. It was clear to everyone that doing this will lead to less money being recovered. You have to have a long-term strategy for things like these and not just try to put out fires when they appear.

      Delete
    2. Xander17 January 2023 at 14:41

      Exactly! Whenever a government is just putting out fires you know there will be trouble soon. You need people who can actually think strategically and compose plans that work for 5-10 years, not just 12 months.

      Delete

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