Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs - Target individuals, bend over for corporations

I passed this advert on the side of a public phone box earlier:

...and it got me thinking as there has been a sustained campaign in the UK media recently by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs with a focus on individuals who may not be declaring all their income.
Radio, TV, and net media, with lines like "Oh it's only £20, how can it harm" or "£50 isn't gonna make a difference to the economy" etc, all aimed at small-time self employed people.


So where is the campaign against Multi-nationals? How many millions are the radio, TV, and poster campaigns costing nationally?
After minimal searching I found this:
www.theguardian.com...

Designed by the ad firm M&C Saatchi, the campaign forms part of a wider £917m evasion and avoidance-busting programme which aims to raise an additional £7bn in tax receipts each year

Critics of the Revenue's approach have suggested it is already piling excessive pressure on some taxpayer groups because they are easy targets rather than being the worst offenders.
Margaret Hodge, chair of the public accounts committee, said last week there was "a mood of anger out there", with many feeling they are hounded by the tax authorities while those suspected of avoiding hundreds of millions of pounds "might be invited in for a cup of coffee with HMRC".

I believe this to be the case, that individuals trying to cut a break in life are being made out to be so damaging society when companies such as Amazon, Google, or HSBC are ripping off billions more each year with their tax evasion, and effectively ignored.

www.theguardian.com...

British officials have "lost their nerve" in tackling tax avoidance by global corporations and have presided over a £35bn tax gap as they pursue easy prey such as small businesses and individuals, a committee of MPs says.

It's pretty obvious that it's easier to go after individuals than big business, and it seems the social programming going on in the UK reflects that, "cash without a receipt is bad", "Pay all your tax" etc.
But stop and think for a moment, a UK citizen does not need to be registered as self-employed to have a tax liability for paid work. Got a mate who fixes your car for you and you throw him a tenner, or you help a neighbour out and they chuck you £20 for what you did? There is a tax liability there in both cases.

# you HMRC, chase the real crooks, not 20% off the £50 jobs 'real' folk do in our communities:
www.theguardian.com...

Four US companies – Amazon, Facebook, Google and Starbucks – have paid just £30m tax on sales of £3.1bn over the last four years, according to a Guardian analysis.
Apple is estimated to have avoided over £550m in tax on more than £2bn worth of underlying profits in Britain by channelling business through Ireland, according to a Sunday Times analysis, while Starbucks has paid no corporation tax in Britain for the last three years.

Again, # you HMRC, spending millions on a national UK advertising campaign on TV, radio, bus stops, telephone boxes, and posters, yet dropping to your knee's with mouth open to Google, Amazon, Vodafone... blah.
The real crooks are in the corporate world...but the corporate world appears to be the friend of HMRC so it is no surprise that the little folk are an easier target.

That said, what are the thoughts of ATS? Are you passionately against someone earning £20 for a small cash job because they don't declare it to HMRC, or do you think that the billions lost to the UK each year through corporate tax avoidance makes the individuals look like small change, and just easy targets.
I passionately believe HMRC are lamely going for the easy publicity individual 'tax avoiders' and making them appear as the enemy while appeasing the corporations who rip off billions each year.

# you HMRC.

a reply to: grainofsand

The Tories, a rich party for the rich

Stuart Gulliver, the HSBC chief executive who has vowed to reform the crisis-hit bank, sheltered millions of pounds in a Swiss account through a Panamanian company and remains tax domiciled in Hong Kong.

www.theguardian.com...

Almost one in four of Britain’s biggest listed companies paid no corporation tax in this country last year – and almost half fail to disclose their tax payments to the UK at all, according to research by The Mail on Sunday.

www.dailymail.co.uk...

a reply to: Zcustosmorum
Exactly the kind of thing I'm going on about here.
"It's only £20, what's the harm" as the HMRC radio adverts say....but we'll drop to our knees with a begging mouth for multinational corporations and accept whatever they wish to spray over HM's face.

a reply to: grainofsand

Corporatism

a reply to: grainofsand

This drives me bonkers. S&F for you because this should be on the front of the papers, daily, forever.

Another example:

Coffee giant Starbucks has paid £5m in UK corporation tax - its first such tax payment since 2009 - the company has announced.
A company spokeswoman said it had listened to its customers and would pay another £5m later this year. The move follows pressure from politicians and campaigners, and an agreement by world leaders last week to clamp down on corporate tax avoidance.
Starbucks has only reported taxable profit once in 15 years in the UK.

BBC - article

If I decide that for the next 15 years I won't bother paying tax - well maybe a made-up figure that suits me, once - I'll be serving time in Cornton Vale faster than you can say fat, greedy, corporate bawbags. These people are beyond the law, I'm sick to the back teeth of them.

a reply to: Zcustosmorum
Interesting link, thank you.
I'll admit I've just skim-read it so far but on first glance it appears to mostly fall into line with my own ranting ramblings in this thread, nice one.

a reply to: beansidhe
I totally agree, corporate tax evasion is the big story that UK media should be chasing...not some bloke who fixes a mates car for £50 cash...and then spending hundreds of millions on advertising campaigns to catch them! WTF?!

It's appears it is not just the self-employed, I heard of a friend who has just switched jobs and they are going after them for their next wage .

They have written to inform this person that they are taking just short of a grand out of their account at the beginning of next month.

This person has worked for big corporations and doesn't do their own tax, so how this individual was able to rack up a tax debt is beyond me, it looks as though it will all be an error, but this poor person meanwhile is being taken through the ringer for what?!

Shame on this country!

a reply to: grainofsand

This is from the Herald in February just there:

Nicola Sturgeon has weighed into the growing political storm over tax avoidance, branding it obscene, immoral and despicable, and promising a "zero tolerance" approach in Scotland...

The First Minister said "a whole political establishment" had negligently allowed tax avoidance to become routine, even though it robbed public services of essential funding.

The Herald

That's for everyone mind, not just corpy-corps. But the problem is that 'Revenue Scotland', the new tax collection scheme will not be autonomous.

So far, Revenue Scotland oversees only two devolved taxes, but its remit is expected to grow as more tax powers are devolved. From April, it will collect and enforce payment of a new Landfill Tax and the Land & Buildings Transaction Tax, which replaces stamp duty, which together are worth around £550m a year. From April 2016, Holyrood will also set all rates of income tax, worth around £10bn.
However the collection and enforcement for income tax will remain with HMRC.

So what's the flipping point? WTF, as you so wisely say.

a reply to: solargeddon
WTF?! Chasing employed people for the mistakes of their corporate employer?!
You couldn't make it up if you tried.
# you HMRC.

If just one person living in the UK reads this thread and decides to say # you to HMRC while deciding how to pay a sole trader for some work they've done, then it will have been worth posting it on ATS.
Chase the billions lost by multinationals, and stop wasting millions advertising the campaign against the individual hard working self employed citizens. Wankers.

originally posted by: beansidhe
However the collection and enforcement for income tax will remain with HMRC.

What?!! HMRC are still in charge of collection and enforcement of devolved income tax decided by Scotland?!
That's not Devo-Max...they clearly lied to you all.

a reply to: grainofsand

Yup, they keep their greasy little hands all over it. Lies, lies and more lies and the worst of it all is we knew it was a lie and yet it still happened. Uuurgh, don't start me. I shall self-censor so as not to derail your thread.

I only pay people cash for precisely this reason, so they don't have to announce their £40 or whatever to HMRC if they don't want to. Until HMRC stop treating mega-companies like gods and spitting on decent folk just trying to earn a living, I won't be stopping that any time soon.

a reply to: beansidhe
Bastards. They (the Crown/government) doesn't only treat sole traders like easy target crap, they have done the same with an entire nation now (Scotland) as well. "Yeah you can raise taxes but HMRC will control how it happens".
Pricks...I wouldn't blame you #ing the UK off now.



...I'll miss you guys tho

Hi Grainofsand, You should know by now that the only reason we pay taxes is so that The Wealthy don't have to pay any. IOW we pay taxes to the rick (who get the bulk of Government Bailouts/Assistance) through the intermediary of the Government itself. The politicians are put there for a reason, so that The Wealthy Pay Nothing! Once you figure that out, then everything else makes sense. Good OP and S&F Arjunanda. a reply to: grainofsand

It is very ironic, seeing as the government are responsible for the national coffers wasted money, safety and sense of security on the botched immigration fiascos that means you cannot even get a GP/dentist appointment / NHS ops etc when needed and that the decent, sick and elderly whose relatives fought for national security have been targeted for the meagre benefits they received whilst paying for terrorists whose aims are destruction of our very lands and culture. That and as already mentioned the hypocrisy of large tax dodging companies, politicians getting 'lunch money', free houses, off shore hedge funds etc. makes the reality of being a UK citizen something of a hypocrisy.

@arjunanda @theabsolutethruth
I agree, it is why I am calling HMRC a bunch of #s in this thread

Lol, double post, but lol at the folk who think the HMRC supporters who post here aren't a bunch of *SNIP ...lol, ...it's not like it's not real life eh.

I really stopped caring about anything they say and do. If we had an income the only reason I'd pay any tax is to support services to those in need and medicare. But that's it.

originally posted by: Unity_99
I really stopped caring about anything they say and do.

I can't stop myself caring, it winds me right up the hypocrisy.
I took the picture in the OP yesterday after a few drinks and I'll admit I was fuming, the thread nearly ended up in the Rant forum but I tried to control the emotion for a discussion! ...and thanks to semperfortis for snipping the offending word in my previous post, I reported myself when I looked at it sober this morning. Apologies to anyone else who saw it.

After a nice cup of tea today though I am still angry about that new stupid advert I'm going to walk past most days, telling me that HM Government think the biggest problem in the UK right now is individuals paying each other small amounts for stuff and not paying the tax on it.
Easy targets much, but last time I was aware there were about 30 investigators in my part of the UK covering 1.5 million people...I wish you good luck with that HMRC.

Here is a 2013 PDF by the UK government regarding estimated tax lost/missing/unpaid:
Meas uring Tax Gaps
Total unpaid tax = £34.4 Billion each year
£9.3 Billion - Large Business
£15.1 Billion - Small and Medium Business
£5.4 Billion - Criminals
£4.6 Billion - Individuals

Isn't it curious that 'criminals' have their own category of tax evaders seperate to 'large business' when it is reasonable to assume that a large business would have a legal/accountancy department which should ensure that the correct amount of tax is paid. Fifteen thousand million pounds worth of innocent 'mistakes', really?
So, even the UK government estimates that only 13% of lost tax is through individuals yet they spend millions on a TV/radio/billboard/phonebox/ATM screen advert campaign to chase the little guy....# you HMRC, get your priorities straight.