Here's a piece from Tax Justice UK.
(38 Degrees has a petition.)
HMRC hasn't prosecuted a single company for enabling tax evasion in six years, a new investigation found this week.
The tax authority was given criminal enforcement powers in 2017 to prosecute companies that help people to evade tax.
At the time, then prime minister David Cameron said that these new powers would “send a clear message to the corrupt that there is no home for them here”. Yet they have never been used.
This casts serious doubts over whether HMRC is preventing and deterring corporate tax avoidance.
So what has led to HMRC being so toothless?
Outgunned and outmaneuvered
As I told The Observer, HMRC is routinely outgunned by the private sector. They simply don’t have the resources to prosecute rich and powerful corporate players.
Criminal prosecutions, especially against big corporate legal teams, take time and money. Yet HMRC is chronically underfunded and understaffed.
As we reported last year, a Parliamentary committee slammed the government for underfunding HMRC.
They estimated that £42 billion could be missing in unpaid tax. And that for every £1 invested in HMRC investigations, £18 was recovered in additional tax.
The government should give HRMC the resources it needs to pursue tax evaders. The new revelations, based on research by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and TaxWatch, will only increase pressure on them to do so.
A real safety net
We have been campaigning for HMRC to be properly funded for years. We also campaign for the money raised from taxes to be spent improving society as a whole.
We cannot have a just and decent country if millions of people are sliding below the poverty line, and getting stuck there.
That’s the conclusion of a damning new report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. They found that getting out of poverty has become much harder over the past two decades.
The numbers are shocking. They estimate that 6 million people in the UK are living in ‘deep poverty’, an increase of 1.5m since the mid 1990s.
This report sits alongside the revelation that tens of thousands have been diagnosed with ‘Victorian era diseases,’ such as rickets and scurvy, since Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister in 2022.
A fairer tax system would ask those with the broadest shoulders to pay more -and use that money to build a real social safety net.
We can start by taxing the high levels of wealth amassed by the ultra-rich, and closing down tax loopholes that allow the richest people and companies to get away without paying their fair share.
That’s what I and the team here are campaigning and fighting for week-in, week-out.
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