HMRC handed power to 'access bank accounts' and scrutinise 'past 20 years'

Comments

• Tikay10 Member, Administrator, Moderator Posts: 175,471

  March 28

  
  
  Quite right too. Everyone - all of us, businesses or private individuals - should pay our taxes in full.

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• rabdeniro Member Posts: 4,533

  March 29

  Agree everybody should pay they're taxes but this smacks of big brother in a back handed manner spying on what you do with yer own cash.

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• Doubleme Member Posts: 2,294

  March 29

  I have mentioned this before with how HMRC screwed up my records still not fixed btw and officially approaching a year, I am not too trusting of this.
  
  in principle one can agree with this idea, so long as the power is not abused and that they are accurate and do not make frequent mistakes. Unfortunately none of that applies which is why this is quite worrying.

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• Essexphil Member Posts: 9,137

  March 29

  The "20 year" bit will be rare. Very rare.
  
  I once had a client who had worked for an Employer for about 10 years. For all of that time this person had had a "BR" Tax Code. This person was not financially savvy, and did not realise that that meant that they were paying tax at the basic 20% rate on all of their earnings (so there was no 0% slice which everyone else gets). Quite why there exists both a "0" Tax Code and a "BR" Tax Code was never explained.
  
  Once they were made aware of this, HMRC were happy to refund quite a lot of the overpayment of tax. But, as that original article says, in the absence of deliberate (as opposed to accidental or negligent) they only have to go back 4 or 6 years. Not the full 10. True for HMRC in both directions.
  
  Which I have to say I thought was rather unfair. But life is like that sometimes.

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