The tax office HMRC has responded to a stinging report from the government’s Public Accounts Committee questioning its record on taxing the super-rich.
The report form MPs called for a tougher approach when tackling contributions from the wealthiest members of society and uncovered that in the five years to March last year the tax authority had completed just 72 fraud investigations into the affairs of the super rich, with only two having been dealt with outside its civil powers.
Of those, only one case resulted in a successful criminal prosecution.
A statement from HMRC challenged the report and said that there was “absolutely no special treatment for the wealthy” and that they were subject to “additional scrutiny” and received “one-to-one marking” by HMRC’s specialist tax collectors.
Those singled out for particular scrutiny in the report included footballers and actors who had exploited the sale of their image rights to avoid tax using the current system.
“The vast majority of people in the UK pay all the tax they owe and today the top one per cent of earners pay more than quarter of all income tax. We have secured an additional £2.5 billion from the very wealthiest since 2010,” HMRC stated in its response.
“The National Audit Office (NAO) commends this approach as being in line with international best practice and confirms that HMRC has increased the amount of tax we collect or secure from the very wealthy that would have otherwise gone unpaid.”
Malcolm Coury, chief executive of Cambridge-based Dartington Wealth Management, said that simply concentrating on income tax was misguided: “That the super wealthy don’t pay tax is largely a myth.
"The people being referred to as the super-rich are very few in number and they’re generally speaking people who don’t just live in the UK, so they spend less than 180 days on these shores each year.
"If you think of the other taxes they pay on the amount they spend when they’re in the UK and the amount of VAT they’re paying and fuel duty they’re paying and taxes on everything they’re spending they do contribute quite significantly.
“So, looking down a very narrow field of what income tax they pay is actually quite misleading.”
