Collecting the right tax from wealthy individuals

On 16 May 2025 the National Audit Office (NAO) published a report into tax compliance among wealthy individuals – its first review of HMRC’s interactions with this group in nearly a decade. The report examined how HMRC supports wealthy individuals to pay the right amount of tax and how HMRC addresses risk and non-compliance. In this article we examine the key findings of the report and what this may mean for HMRC interactions.

Wealthy individuals are defined as those who have either:

• an annual income of £200 000 or more; or
• assets of at least £2m in any of the previous three years.

HMRC has a dedicated team that is responsible for this population – the wealthy team – within the wealthy mid-size business customer compliance group.

Unless otherwise stated below the statistics highlighted come from the NAO report.

Resourcing HMRC adequately

The NAO estimates that...