Saturday, June 24, 2023

Taxes Going Unpaid Could Fund UK Transport Department for a Year




Alex Morales
Thu, June 22, 2023 

(Bloomberg) -- Britain is losing £36 billion ($46 billion) in unpaid taxes, almost enough to fund the entire Department for Transport, according to official figures.

HM Revenue and Customs collected 95.2% of the £739 billion ($941 billion) theoretically owed during the fiscal year to March 2022, leaving a 4.8% “tax gap,” the tax authority said in a statement Thursday.

The data, published on Thursday, is from a year when Prime Minister Rishi Sunak served as Chancellor of the Exchequer, opening him up to criticism from the opposition Labour Party for his failure to clamp down on non-payment, especially among wealthier taxpayers.

While the tax gap was £5 billion more than in 2020-21, as a percentage of total potential revenue it remained at the lowest in a data series going back to 2005-06. Labour said Sunak should have made further progress.

“These are hugely concerning figures, showing that the Treasury failed to close the tax gap at all in percentage terms in Rishi Sunak’s final year in charge,” a Labour treasury spokesman, Pat McFadden, said in a statement.




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