Collecting the right tax from wealthy individuals

HMRC should develop a clear strategic vision and plan for its work tackling wealthy non-compliance, particularly to help meet the organisation?s broader mission to reduce the size of the tax gap. This strategy should provide structure to its efforts across the organisation, with clearly articulated objectives, timescales and success factors.

HMRC should keep its definition of the wealthy population under review as the base continues to grow. This should include considering whether greater segmentation of wealthy taxpayers, such as by different wealth bands, would help it to better understand risk and target resources to achieve better compliance outcomes.

HMRC should assess the impact of its customer compliance manager model and the accelerated schemes that bring together a range of specialisms to tackle its most complex wealthy cases. It should assess what combination of interventions are most effective for the different customer segments within the wealthy group, whether these interventions should be used more, less or in different ways, and the level of resources required to maximise value for money.

HMRC needs to take a more dynamic approach to understanding risk, both for wealthy individuals and more widely across connected customer groups. It should consider whether its assessment of risk should include explicit risks of non-compliance by the very wealthy.

HMRC needs to improve the information it collects, organises and uses on agents to regularly and consistently assess the risks in the agent population. HMRC should improve its understanding of how tax professionals influence compliance, in a positive and negative way, and build that insight into its understanding of risk and compliance responses.

HMRC should consider how it can provide the public with greater transparency about the amount of tax that wealthy individuals pay, and the contributions of the different segments within it ? such as for customers in different wealth bands. It should continue to improve its assessment of the offshore tax gap

HMRC needs to make the most of the relationships it has built up with other tax authorities. It should learn from other countries by comparing approaches to compliance work, including the types of information collected and analysis carried out, to both close off data gaps and ensure accessibility of datasets and research. HMRC already provides much leadership internationally and should seek to further reduce gaps in data and intelligence, including data on income from non-financial assets, and to address the challenges and complexities associated with internationally mobile taxpayers.

HMRC should assess the skills and capabilities it needs to ensure wealthy tax compliance in the future. Given the complexity and range of affairs HMRC needs to deal with, it should consider external recruitment of people with sufficient experience of wealthy tax affairs and expertise in international arrangements.