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Member of Parliament for Amber Valley

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Tackling Tax Fraud – Public Accounts Committee Inquiry

I recently led a Public Accounts Committee session on tackling tax fraud, where we called on the HMRC Chief Executive, Lin Homer to give evidence on HMRC and their efforts to tackle tax fraud. You can read the full transcript from the session here.

HMRC estimates show that losses to tax fraud amount to £16 billion each year – which is almost half of HMRC’s estimate of the tax gap (£34 billion): the difference between the amount of tax HMRC should collect each year and the amount it actually collects. Reducing the amount of tax that is lost due to tax fraud is a high priority for HMRC, so it was good to have this opportunity to grill the Chief Executive to ask for it’s assessment for how well this has been done so far and how they can tackle it better in the future.

People are quite rightly, very angry that there are people who deliberately choose not to pay the tax that they legally owe and it is right that the HMRC should be doing everything possible to identify and bring these cases to prosecutors. I would like to see further progress from HMRC on this matter and I look forward to seeing this implemented.