Too soon to draw conclusions on HMRC’s use of its powers

The Chartered Institute of Taxation asked members to share their experiences of how HMRC has implemented eight specific post-2012 powers identified for review by HMRC’s powers and customer safeguards implementation evaluation forum. This was set up in July 2019 after the House of Lords’ economic affairs committee’s December 2018 report Treating taxpayers fairly.

The institute received fewer than 20 responses but said this was ‘not entirely unexpected’. It believes this was mainly because a lot of the powers in scope operate in specialist areas such as offshore tax non-compliance and the general anti-abuse rule and others are new such as the corporate criminal offence so experience of them is limited.  

Most responses were about the requirement to correct past offshore tax non-compliance (RTC) (F(No 2)A 2017 Sch 18). Concerns included: