Tax Day Tax Avoidance Promotions Marketing
Published / Last Updated on 03/04/2021
The proposal is to give HMRC more power to tackle promotional material that tries to market tax avoidance schemes to UK investors.
HMRC was tasked a number of years ago to crack down on tax avoidance which has been immensely successful saving the tax payer £billions each year and now the focus is on those introducers that market tax avoidance schemes. It is not just the arranger now or the tax avoider themselves, it is the person or business that markets those schemes whether by post, email, online or social media.
The paper suggests:
- Giving HMRC more power to secure or freeze a promoter’s assets so that the penalties they are liable for are paid, tackling offshore promoters and the UK entities that support them.
- Closing down companies that promote avoidance schemes and disqualifying their directors.
- Helping taxpayers to identify and get out of such tax avoidance schemes.
We have already suggested that HMRC has been immensely successful in tackling tax avoidance, that said HMRC has had little power to pursue promoters of large-scale tax avoidance schemes with eth reality that consumers that get caught up in such schemes are left ‘high and dry’ with no legal representation to defend themselves and HMRC need power to force tax penalties on the avoidance scheme promoters to cover any tax penalties and legal costs.
