A National Audit Office report released today praises HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) for returning £4.50 for every £1 spent in dealing with the ‘hidden economy’ in 2006-07 and for the success of recent campaigns encouraging people into the formal economy.
HMRC’s own figures released earlier show the yield gained from all of its efforts to combat tax evasion has increased dramatically over the last fifteen years, according to Ronnie Ludwig of Saffery Champness in BBC News.
The money collected from a wide range of sources – from individuals and companies who had failed to fill in their forms, to investigations of outright tax fraud – in fact climbed from £1.13bn in 1991-92 to a staggering £9.17bn in 2006-07.
The latest amount does not include the additional £400m expected in 2007-08 from people who have been hiding money in offshore bank accounts but does include an extra £834m from tighter scrutiny of corporate tax returns and more than £1bn from probing self-assessed tax returns.
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