Mon, 24 Oct 2011

Pressure mounts on HMRC boss to step down

Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) chief, Dave Hartnett, is coming under increased pressure to step down from his post over his role in ‘sweetheart’ deals with Vodafone and Goldman Sachs, which lost UK taxpayers billions of pounds.

Public Accounts Committee (PAC) members have accused Hartnett of lying to parliament, with committee member, Conservative MP Richard Bacon, saying that if the taxman had been a politician, “he would have been forced to resign by now”.

And angry protestors descended on HMRC’s head offices in London on Monday to demand his resignation.

It is alleged Vodafone owed the Exchequer £6 billion in unpaid taxes but that following a series of private meetings the Revenue settled on a £1.25 billion payment.

And a Freedom of Information request last year found that Hartnett was Whitehall’s most ‘wined and dined’ civil servant, treated to corporate hospitality 107 times in three years.

UK Uncut activist, Sam Gilbert, who was taking part in the protests, said: “The money from Vodafone’s £6 billion tax dodge alone could have prevented all of the cuts in public services over the past year.”

But an HMRC spokesman said that Monday’s demonstration was based on a serious misunderstanding about how the Revenue polices corporate businesses.

“We do not do ‘sweetheart deals’ with anyone, focusing our attention on those corporate businesses that abuse the rules. This work brought in an additional £9 billion for the UK last year, underlining the reality that HMRC is very effectively taxing this key sector of the economy,” he said.

See also:

• Record number of SA tax returns filed on time as new penalty regime comes into force
• HMRC reviews unfair practice of letting P35 late penalties build up before issuing them
• New HMRC chief executive was implicated in UK’s worst vote-rigging scandal