Another week another financial scandal. This time with HSBC and their private Swiss banking branch, where a whistle blower has revealed that over 100,000 clients, from more than 200 countries held money in accounts, some of which were used for tax evasion. To be clear, holding a foreign bank account is perfectly legal - so long as you declare the money and where it has come from to your home country's tax authorities.
It turned out that of the 7,000 British nationals holding some of these accounts, 1,100 have been forced to pay tax, including fines of up to 200% of the tax owed, and interest, of £135 million.
The area of taxation is contentious. Tax planning is what we all do and perfectly normal. Tax evasion is illegal, deliberately setting out break both the letter and the spirit of the law. Tax avoidance is more subtle, where someone using the letter of the law can get around the spirit of the law. That is something that the government is cracking down on.
Many people use tax avoidance schemes and the previous government brought in a system of pre-approval of these schemes with the then Inland Revenue. This meant that these schemes had the tax man's approval and so makes it harder to break up now. But readers will have seen the high profile tax avoidance schemes in the press, used by many individuals. We are doing what we can within law to crack down on them.
Let's be clear, if you are evading tax or fiddling benefits, it is theft and you will be caught. Benefit cheats have around 3,300 inspectors seeking them out and there are many cases of benefit fraudsters being prosecuted. IN the case of tax evasion, HMRC has 26,923 people working in their compliance and enforcement department, and 390 specifically looking at just 5,000 individuals with a personal net worth of over £20 million. In addition, they have a department of a further 300 looking at how to bust up tax avoidance schemes. International agreements are working out ways to secure international cheats.
Cleaning up the banks is a big task. One of the things that I was instrumental in bringing to the reform of banks was personal accountability of senior individuals. Only by holding a senior individual account for a breach of rules can we secure better outcomes for customers.