Tax Evasion higher than HMRC say?

[Tekkommo]

I'm not saying the report is true, just interested in opinions.

http://leftfootforward.org/2014/09/h...g-says-report/

I'm surprised that it says evasion is as high as £80 billion, and that avoidance is as low as £19 billion.

Taken from this report I believe http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Docume...ap2014Full.pdf

[Deleted]

how tall is HMRC?

[Deleted]

The source is Tax-Research UK and the funding is from PCS. Both highly biased lobbying organisations.

TBH my personal suspicion is our civil service is likely better at calculating these things than partisan lobbyists.

From Wikipedia about Richard Murphy (the guy that runs Tax Research UK):

Murphy is well known for his estimates that "£25 billion is lost annually from tax avoidance".[4] This is substantially larger than HM Revenue and Customs' estimates of the tax gap, and his estimate has been dismissed by HMRC.[5] His methodology has been criticised by other groups, including the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation in their December 2012 publication The Tax Gap for Corporation Tax.,[6] and right-wing think tanks like the TaxPayers' Alliance which claim he has failed to take into account double taxation relief on overseas profits and for including taxes not paid in the same tax year as the profits were earned,[7] and the Institute for Fiscal Studies which cited his estimate of the corporate tax gap for the TUC as one which was "likely overstated (possibly by a wide margin)".[8]

His studies have been debunked by the government, the civil service, unbiased university research and other lobbying organisations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richar...y_(accountant)

It's also worth noting that Tax Research UK, despite it's grand sounding name, is little more than one man and a blog.

http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/

[Tekkommo]

Thanks Mike, what I was thinking.