Taxation and the Rule of Law

There are certain ideas and proposed practices that should be killed at birth. Such a proposal is the one from the Inland Revenue that they should be given powers to raid bank accounts without first getting a court order.

The proposal from the Inland Revenue that they should be given such powers is put forward at the same time as the National Audit Office have found that, in the year to April, mistakes by officials at HM Revenue & Customs resulted in taxpayers making £157 million of overpayments and £125 million of underpayments.

We thus have the juxtaposition of one million people taxed wrongly according to the National Audit Office and a proposal that the error prone Revenue, who have overseen the million mistakes, should be given powers to raid bank accounts without first getting a court order.

There needs to be new more effective taxation laws to pursue those who choose not to pay taxes (and of equal importance those who are non resident for taxation purposes but whose main business is in the UK) but the present Revenue proposals are not the way.