{"id":31,"date":"2006-07-24T07:46:58","date_gmt":"2006-07-24T06:46:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=31"},"modified":"2006-07-24T07:46:58","modified_gmt":"2006-07-24T06:46:58","slug":"the-massive-threat-of-carousel-fraud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=31","title":{"rendered":"The massive threat of carousel fraud"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You&#8217;ve probably never heard of it. But HM Revenue &#038; Customs (HMRC) reckon that it accounted for a record \u00a37.4 billion of imports and exports in the first quarter of the current financial year . That represents a six-fold increase in a year. That means that this financial year the total losses to the Exchequer could be around than \u00a335 billion. According to <a href=\"http:\/\/business.guardian.co.uk\/story\/0,,1821097,00.html\">an article<\/a> in the &#8220;Guardian&#8221;, that is the equivalent to 3p on the basic rate of income tax.<br \/>\nCarousel fraud involves a circular trade of cross border purchases, typically of computer chips or mobile phones, between connected companies, and sometimes controlled by criminal syndicates. In its simplest form, a fraudster imports goods from a zero-rate VAT source, sells the goods with VAT included and then disappears without passing the VAT onto Customs.<br \/>\nApparently Revenue &#038; Customs has 1,000 investigators working on the frauds &#8211; but this ought to ba massive political issue. If a political party went into an election promising to add 3p to the burden on taxpayers or to cut 3p off the tax rate, it would be a sensation. But this huge scale of fraud barely makes the news.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You&#8217;ve probably never heard of it. But HM Revenue &#038; Customs (HMRC) reckon that it accounted for a record \u00a37.4 billion of imports and exports in the first quarter of the current financial year . That represents a six-fold increase in a year. That means that this financial year the total losses to the Exchequer [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31","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\/31","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=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}