24 November 2012
Last updated at 00:01 GMT
By Kevin Peachey
Personal finance reporter, BBC News
Tax avoidance and evasion has led to a number of protests by campaigners
Hundreds
of suspected tax avoiders are to receive letters in the coming weeks
warning them that their financial affairs are facing special scrutiny.
HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) is sending letters directly to
1,500 people who it believes have signed up to one particular avoidance
scheme.
The correspondence, the first of its kind, is a pre-emptive strike before the scheme's legality is challenged.
The National Audit Office said such schemes cost the UK more than £10bn.
In a report, published on Wednesday, the watchdog said HMRC
was dealing with a backlog of 41,000 cases of aggressive tax avoidance
involving individuals and small companies.
Penalties
In an attempt to tackle the backlog, HMRC is sending out four
versions of the same letter in a pilot scheme. The first wave of about
700 will start landing on doormats on Saturday.
One version says: "You are in the small minority of people
who have made the deliberate choice to avoid tax. We focus our resources
on this small minority. The choice that you have made changes the way
we view your tax affairs.
"Our Specialist Investigations Unit will be carrying out a
full investigation into this scheme and they will open an enquiry into
your tax affairs."
It goes on to suggest that people who use the scheme could
find that they have to pay the outstanding tax, plus interest, and - in
certain circumstances - could face a financial penalty.
It provides contact and payment details for people if they wish to pull out of the scheme immediately and pay up.
No details have been revealed about the recipients of the
letters, who live across the UK. Although they are not all thought to be
among the mega-rich, one tax expert said he would be surprised if there
were no big names among them.
'Reality check'
Tax avoidance schemes are legal but, in this case, HMRC is saying that it has good reasons to put it under the microscope.
Continue reading the main story
Extracts from the tax letters
We are committed to challenging aggressive tax avoidance, and
we will do so through the courts where appropriate. If we do this then
it will lead to years of uncertainty about your tax affairs, and mean
considerable additional cost to you. We are already challenging similar
schemes and we have a very successful track record in the courts with
schemes of this type.
Your decision to use a scheme such as this means that we will
treat you as a higher risk customer. Therefore we will monitor more
closely your tax affairs in the future.
.......
Paying your taxes in full is the right thing to do. Not
paying tax reduces our public finances. We all lose out on essential
public services such as roads, the NHS and schools.
In the new tactic, it is writing
to people directly to give them the opportunity to get out of the
scheme, which has not been named publicly.
An HMRC spokesman admitted that these people were free to
argue because no ruling had yet been made about the legality of this
scheme.
Normally, HMRC would contact the promoters of these schemes,
rather than the individual investors themselves, to tell them that they
will be challenging the scheme at a tax tribunal.
Tax avoidance schemes have hit the headlines in recent months.
They have included the Jersey-based K2 scheme which featured the membership - now cancelled - of comedian Jimmy Carr.
More than 1,000 people were thought to be using the scheme which was said to be sheltering £168m a year from the Treasury.
Under the K2 scheme, an individual resigned from their
company and any salary they subsequently received was paid to an
offshore trust which then lent investors back the money. As this is a
loan that can technically be recalled, there was no income tax due.
HMRC has been criticised for failing to properly curb aggressive avoidance schemes.
The National Audit Office's report said that between 2004 and
2011, about 2,300 avoidance schemes were disclosed to the tax
authorities, with more than 100 new schemes emerging in each of the past
four years.
HMRC said it had successfully challenged 40 schemes in two
years, but MPs said that the UK tax authority must do better in tackling
"mass-marketed" schemes.
Chas Roy-Chowdhury, of the ACCA tax body, said that the
letters were a good way of HMRC trying to get the numbers of these
schemes down to "more manageable levels".
He said that the correspondence would be a "reality check" for many recipients.
"This is the first time HMRC is contacting people directly
and putting down in black and white exactly what the position is for
them. It will make people think twice," he said.
"I hope it does bring down the numbers and restore some faith in the tax system."
He said it was also a good way of pointing out that much of the accountancy trade was not involved in promoting these schemes.COPY http://www.bbc.co.uk
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