HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) is cracking down on people who are not paying their fair share of tax with an advertising campaign targeting people who have been trying to hide money by putting it into offshore accounts.
Speaking to the press after the G20 summit in Australia, where he was coordinating a global clampdown on tax avoidance, Chancellor George Osborne said that the campaign acts as a reminder that if people continually decide to hide money in secretive tax havens, such as Switzerland, “then we are coming after them”.
According to Mr Osborne, the authorities are expecting to collect a significant amount of revenue from the campaign but the challenge is finding out exactly what is hidden offshore.
Supporting the Chancellor’s words, a spokeswoman for HMRC said that most people with offshore assets “do the right thing and tell us about them” but “for the minority who do not, the net is closing around them”.
She added that people found to be evading tax could face fines of 200 per cent of the tax owed and the possibility of criminal prosecution and even imprisonment.
Meanwhile, the taxman has been busy on the home front, with the department notching up a record £122m after a crackdown on false self-employment in the construction industry, a 55 per cent increase on the £78.9m taken in 2011-12.
However, although this has been hailed as a great result by HMRC, the flexibility provided by self-employed status has been one of the ways both businesses and workers in the construction sector have remained competitive through an extremely challenging period for the industry, which will now be lost.
In fact, a further 200,000 construction workers who are paid through outsourced employment agencies face being considered as employed for tax reasons.