by Claire Aston | Mar 6, 2024
Responding to today’s Spring Budget 2024, the TaxWatch team focuses its thoughts on a few areas it found particularly interesting, from a tax compliance and administration standpoint. Furnished Holiday Lettings (FHL) As speculated in recent days, the Chancellor...
by Claire Aston | Feb 28, 2024
40% reduction in civil servants defined as ‘tax professionals’ from 2016 to 2023 The overall HMRC workforce has shrunk since 2010, despite the challenges of the department’s workload increasing as the tax regime has become more complex Salaries paid to senior HMRC...
by Claire Aston | Feb 26, 2024
Following our recent article on customer service, the other side of the coin in terms of HMRC effectiveness relates to its compliance activity. Current Tax Gap is 4.8%, or £36bn for 2021/22 HMRC neither resourced nor tasked to reduce the Tax Gap below its current...
by Claire Aston | Feb 21, 2024
It’s good to see national newspapers showing an interest in HMRC performance data and raising important issues about properly funding our tax authority. However, a recent article in The Guardian about trends in case numbers opened by a niche HMRC team requires a bit...
by Claire Aston | Feb 13, 2024
3.8m tax returns outstanding a week before the deadline Taxpayers spent 6 million hours waiting on the phone in 2022-23 And 2 million hours waiting on the phone in first 8 months of 2023-24 22 minutes average wait time for HMRC to answer calls this year £100m+...
by Claire Aston | Oct 25, 2023
Our new report “State of Tax Administration 2023” looks at data from HMRC’s Annual Report and Accounts 2022-23, along with Freedom of Information requests and other publicly available data to get a feel for the current state of administration of the UK tax...
