Government response

HMRC statement in response to Public Accounts Committee report

HMRC statement in response to Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report - ‘Tax avoidance: the role of large accountancy firms’

Jim Harra, Director General Business Tax, said;

The facts show that we are not only aggressively fighting battles against tax avoidance, but we are winning them.

Since the end of 2012, we have won 11 Tax Tribunal cases against avoidance schemes, two of which were against large corporates. In the last three years alone, we have litigated more than 50 major avoidance cases, protecting billions of pounds of tax in the process.

HMRC’s transfer pricing investigations have generated more than £4 billon in extra tax revenues over the last four years.

Backing HMRC’s success, last year, the Government announced further investment of £77 million to expand our anti-avoidance and evasion work and much of this will be used to accelerate our challenges to multinationals’ transfer pricing arrangements and is expected to bring in an additional £2 billion over the next five years.

Published 26 April 2013