Margaret Snowdon raised a petition this week campaigning to change tax law to help victims of financial scams, but had it taken down.
In a press briefing, as part of the ‘Enough is Enough’ march yesterday (April 17), Snowdon, chair of PSIG, said her petition had been taken down and deemed ‘inappropriate’ because the information provided had not been verified by a third party.
The petition was calling for a change in law to give HMRC the power to disapply tax charges in cases where losses were due to dishonesty by a third party.
She said: “A third party needed to independently verify what I had put in the petition was true but all I was saying was that people were suffering and we needed to change something.”
Snowdon confirmed once she had received third party verification she would put the petition back up.
As part of the march calling for a statutory inquiry into financial misconduct, Snowdon delivered a speech at Downing Street discussing how for the past 10 years she has been fighting against pension scams.
She said: “I started doing this because I could see that scammers, many of them regulated advisers and some pretending to be, were able to get their hooks into ordinary hardworking people and fool them into believing that it was right to transfer their retirement savings to what looked like safe and secure pension schemes, the schemes were registered with HMRC after all.
“The scammers were able to operate with impunity and authorities failed to stop them because they couldn’t see what was going wrong.
"Unlike good advisers, the scammers had no interest in doing the best thing for individuals they snared. On the contrary, the scammers got away with a fortune because very few have ever been held to account.”
Snowdon said in 2014 her goal was to stop scammers being able to take people’s savings and quickly saw the reality of the damage the scams caused to victims’ lives and the little support they were given.
“What I discovered was that HMRC and the government blamed the victims, but worse than that, they assumed that all victims were guilty of trying to avoid tax. This is far from the truth.
“Ordinary people don’t understand complex pension rules and they certainly don’t associate pensions with tax, let alone tax avoidance. Nonetheless, HMRC treats them all as if they were guilty of cheating the tax man.
“Therefore, on top of losing most of their savings, HMRC has pursued them for tax charges for over a decade and has pursued them in an unnecessarily aggressive way.
"Now to be fair to HMRC, their job is to collect tax that is due. They say they have no choice, but it is never reasonable to bully and frighten people and treat them criminals without any evidence. It’s a case of when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” she added.
Snowdon believed the law needed to change to fit the “new world” and has been campaigning to give HMRC the power to disapply tax charges in cases where losses were due to dishonesty by a third party.
She said: “I have written to prime ministers, to chancellors, to treasury secretaries, but those who bother to reply just trot out the same old message which is ‘our hands are tied/ the people did something they shouldn’t have/we need to discourage others from doing the same’.”
Snowdon said the fact financial scams were happening across multiple sectors not just limited to pensions suggested something was “fundamentally broken”.
“That’s why I am marching for justice for victims of financial misconduct across the UK.For people who have been let down by the system. People let down by police who don’t investigate the scammers, let down by politicians who can’t see that the world has become a dangerous place for retirement savers and for all victims of financial crime let down by unacceptable treatment by HMRC,” she added.
alina.khan@ft.com
