The Daily Mail City team explains why George Osborne is pumping more money into Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs
One of life’s two certainties?
Yes, if the people who work at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs get their way.
They are responsible for overseeing the money flowing into government coffers and, if necessary, chasing it down from people or corporations who are unwilling to part with it.
Don’t I pay enough?
Quite possibly.
But we’re told there aren’t enough collectors and they aren’t funded well enough. This is at the core of the problems with the UK’s £32billion tax gap.
That is why George Osborne yesterday proposed to give HMRC an extra £154million.
More... Taxman has spent too long targeting small firms when the biggest tax dodgers are the multi-national giantsHow big is the problem?
In 2005 some 97,073 people worked at HMRC, but by 2010 that had fallen to 66,992.
A spending review in 2010 proposed a 16.5pc drop in funding, resulting in a further 10,000 job cuts. In the same period since 2005, the tax gap has been reduced by only £1billion.
So will more funding work?
It can’t hurt. Osborne estimates the extra cash will bring in an extra £10billion over five years.
The department is recruiting 100 investigators for its ‘affluence unit’ which targets rich individuals.
Anything else?It will never be a level playing field. With corporations paying their accountants far more than HMRC ever would, the talent tends to flow from collecting tax to finding ways of avoiding it.