Common law offence of cheating the public revenue

It might be thought that taxation in England and Wales is regulated entirely by statute. Numerous provisions govern not only the charge rate and collection of tax from the law-abiding taxpayer but also what should happen in cases of non-compliance. Specific provisions criminalise particular types of conduct regulate the investigation of tax evasion and state the penalties to be imposed.

Surprisingly alongside this purpose-built criminal procedure there exists an offence that rests largely on a definition provided not by parliament but by the courts and commentators of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the offence of ‘cheating the public revenue’.

A wide definition

It is an offence at common law to defraud or ‘cheat’ the general public (R v Hudson [1956] 2 QB 252). The offence was preserved by the Theft Act 1968 s 32(1)(a) which abolished the offence of cheating...