Historically, when the Inland Revenue have opened an investigation and that investigation has lead to a suspicion of fraud, the taxpayer was quite rightly given three options. Those options were as follows: –<\/p>\n
1. Believe to be innocent but will co-operate to put any wrongdoing right
\n2. Admit guilt
\n3. Deny allegations<\/p>\n
However, a recent rule change has meant that option 1, believe innocence but will co-operate, has been phased out!<\/p>\n
Instead, taxpayers will have two option:<\/p>\n
1. Admit guilt
\n2. Deny allegations<\/p>\n
I believe that this could lead to a significant increase in the amount of criminal prosecutions against tax evaders in the future and my concern is that people who believe they are innocent will not have the opportunity to co-operate with HMRC and instead will have to go through the worry of being subjected to criminal proceedings through the courts.<\/p>\n
I suspect the reason why the Inland Revenue have made this rule change is because they haven’t got the resources to deal with taxpayers wanting to co-operate and instead see the criminal proceedings route as the ‘quick fix’ option.
\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Historically, when the Inland Revenue have opened an investigation and that investigation has lead to a suspicion of fraud, the taxpayer was quite rightly given three options. Those options were as follows: – 1. Believe to be innocent but will co-operate to put any wrongdoing right 2. Admit guilt 3. Deny allegations However, a recent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n