{"id":14708,"date":"2014-05-22T08:02:49","date_gmt":"2014-05-22T07:02:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=14708"},"modified":"2014-05-22T08:02:49","modified_gmt":"2014-05-22T07:02:49","slug":"how-the-uk-treasury-could-be-losing-four-times-as-much-tax-as-it-thinks-it-fails-to-collect-that-would-be-40-billion-each-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=14708","title":{"rendered":"How the UK Treasury could be losing four times as much tax as it thinks it fails to collect &#8211; that would be \u00a340 billion each year"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>&#8220;The size of the total gap between what taxpayers owe and what they pay was last year estimated by HMRC to be \u00a335m, or 7%, shortfall for 2011\/12, but that includes legal and illegal tax dodging, fraud and errors. It said the shadow economy and evasion was costing it \u00a310.5bn.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>BUT:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;The Treasury is losing \u00a340bn a year due to a shadow economy where firms and individuals deliberately hide sales from the taxman, according to a leading tax justice campaigner, Richard Murphy. His findings, if correct, would make the scale of tax evasion from sales going unreported to HMRC four times as big official figures suggest.<\/p>\n<p>The report, published on Monday, has been swiftly rejected by HMRC as &#8220;seriously flawed&#8221;, although the tax campaigner said it had been peer reviewed by academics and other tax experts.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>See full story <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/politics\/2014\/may\/20\/treasury-believed-to-lose-40bn-each-year-due-to-hidden-sales\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>As a comparison, note that the Department of Work and Pensions estimates benefit fraud costs \u00a31 billion a year. Putting that in some kind of perspective, the Department expects to spend a total of \u00a3148 billion on benefits, including income support, housing benefit, disability and unemployment payments and more. A billion pounds going AWOL isn\u2019t to be sniffed at, but it\u2019s worth pointing out that it\u2019s just 0.7 per cent of total spending on these benefits.<\/p>\n<p>So, why doesn&#8217;t the media give 10 times &#8211; or even 40 times &#8211; as much coverage to tax evasion as benefit fraud?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;The size of the total gap between what taxpayers owe and what they pay was last year estimated by HMRC to be \u00a335m, or 7%, shortfall for 2011\/12, but that includes legal and illegal tax dodging, fraud and errors. It said the shadow economy and evasion was costing it \u00a310.5bn.&#8221; BUT: &#8220;The Treasury is losing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-british-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14708"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14708\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14713,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14708\/revisions\/14713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}