HMRC soft on big business ?
As many small businesses will know, there’s an old adage, that if you owe a bank or a big institution £5,000.00 you’re in trouble, but if you owe £5 million, you’re in a decent negotiating position.
This seems to be borne out by some heated debate in the House of Commons recently during which it was suggested that HMRC has failed to collect the staggering figure of £25 billion from some of the UK’s biggest companies. If true this is frankly scandalous. The figure of £25 billion seems to be HMRC’s own estimate and to put this into context it equates to £1,000.00 for each UK household or 6p reduction in the basic rate of income tax.
The issue was recently raised in the House of Commons and has not exactly made headline news, which we find somewhat surprising. Other interesting aspects of this potential scandal are :-
- The figure of £25 billion relates to possible unclaimed taxes from 2,700 of the biggest UK companies.
- When it comes to these big tax discrepancies the same senior officials at HMRC have been negotiating and approving any settlements with the taxpayers, which is not exactly great corporate governance process.
The above will be even more galling to small businesses at a time when the HMRC is getting ever tougher on small business tax collection and where it has been acknowledged that a huge 6 million individual taxpayers have apparently been overcharged by an average £400.00 each.
Is it any wonder that the British public and small businesses are stepping out of the usual apathy towards politics and Government and that there is genuine anger out there towards the excesses of big business cozy capitalism ?
What are your thought and/or experiences on this issue ?
