{"id":271,"date":"2025-07-16T00:53:47","date_gmt":"2025-07-16T00:53:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/?p=271"},"modified":"2025-07-16T00:53:47","modified_gmt":"2025-07-16T00:53:47","slug":"hmrc-does-not-know-how-much-tax-billionaires-pay-say-mps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/?p=271","title":{"rendered":"HMRC does not know how much tax billionaires pay, say MPs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for free<\/p>\n<p class=\"article__content-sign-up-topic-description o3-type-body-base\"><span>Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><iframe class=\"article__content-sign-up-iframe close\" scrolling=\"no\" id=\"signUpIframe\" data-prev-url=\"\/register\/in-article-sign-up?ft-content-uuid=60fb69b2-f464-4f86-ba03-2ec69af5197c\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<div id=\"article-body\">\n<p>The UK\u2019s tax authority does not know how much tax billionaires pay, an influential group of cross-party MPs has found, as the government considers a levy on the country\u2019s richest individuals to close the country\u2019s growing fiscal hole.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHM Revenue &amp; Customs has no overview of an individual\u2019s total wealth and faces challenges in getting all the data it needs to risk assess and target wealthy people,\u201d according to a report by the House of Commons public accounts committee.<\/p>\n<p>Lloyd Hatton, a Labour MP and member of the committee, said: \u201cI think they know probably how many billionaires there are, I don\u2019t think HMRC know how much tax they\u2019re currently paying as a cohort.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Hatton added that HMRC\u2019s estimates of the \u201cwealthy tax gap\u201d and the \u201coffshore tax gap\u201d, which represent the difference between money owed and money collected were \u201cwoefully inaccurate\u201d by billions of pounds.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe are talking about large sums of money which we can invest into our public services,\u201d he said, \u201cso this makes a real difference, if we get it right\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>The report, released on Wednesday, also congratulated HMRC for collecting \u00a35.2bn from wealthy individuals in 2023-24, more than double the \u00a32.2bn it raised in 2019-20.<\/p>\n<p>The Labour government has left the door open to higher taxes on the wealthy to close a widening fiscal deficit as the Treasury promises to \u201cprotect working people\u201d ahead of the Autumn Budget.<\/p>\n<p>A wealth tax would follow measures in the Budget last October targeting the rich, including the abolition of the non-dom regime and changes to agricultural and business property relief. <\/p>\n<p>Sir Keir Starmer\u2019s spokesperson last week said: \u201cThe prime minister has repeatedly said those with the broadest shoulders should carry the largest burden.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The report\u2019s recommendations included that HMRC should use artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse data and should draw on publicly available information such as the Sunday Times Rich List to create a more complete profile of individuals\u2019 wealth.<\/p>\n<p>Hatton said the Inland Revenue Service in the US already used the Forbes 400 list of billionaires in its research. However, the accuracy and comprehensiveness of such lists are disputed on the basis that wealthy people\u2019s financial arrangements are often private and hard to penetrate.<\/p>\n<p>The report criticised a sharp fall in penalties applied by HMRC to wealthy individuals from 1,750 in 2022-23 to 456 in 2023-24 and said the authority\u2019s stated ambition to increase both penalties and prosecutions was \u201cunderwhelming\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cExtra resources were announced in the recent spending review which allows us to significantly step up our work on closing the tax gap among the wealthiest,\u201d HMRC said. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis includes recruiting an extra 400 officials specialising in the wealthy and offshore tax gap, and increasing prosecutions of those who evade tax,\u201d it added. <\/p>\n<p>A wealthy person in the UK is defined as having an income of \u00a3200,000 or assets of more than \u00a32mn in any of the past three years.<\/p>\n<p>Phineas Hirsch, a lawyer at Payne Hicks Beach, said global tax authorities already had access to data about offshore wealth given the introduction of the Common Reporting Standard, which allows the automatic exchange of information about people\u2019s bank accounts, in 2017.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt is inevitable that AI will speed up the \u2018joining of the dots\u2019 so that tax authorities can process the information received on foreign assets,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>#HMRC #tax #billionaires #pay #MPs<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. The UK\u2019s tax authority does not know how much tax billionaires pay, an influential group of cross-party MPs has found, as the government considers a levy on the country\u2019s richest individuals to close the country\u2019s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":272,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[443,442,221,444,89],"class_list":{"0":"post-271","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-billionaires","9":"tag-hmrc","10":"tag-mps","11":"tag-pay","12":"tag-tax"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}