HMRC has published a summary of its results in tax avoidance litigation over the past year. It has been in general very successful, but there is more behind the headlines.
HMRC has scored 'wins' in 19 out of the 24 tax avoidance cases that it lists and the remaining 5 were 'partial wins'.
It lost 1/3rd of proceedural cases, that case was Patel & Patel and whether HMRC could investigate a voluntary returns, the legislation for these returns has been subsequently changed.
It was also successful in 4/5 Judical review cases. It shows this was 5/5 on the screen with a correction below.
Comment
On our new 'Kipper scale' where: 10 = its totally untrue ('I made it all up') and 1 = this is true but it could be read differently: its a queston of semantics.
This could be a 4. HMRC have definitely missed off a few cases. Can you spot them? Also partial win, is also a partial fail as far as costs to the taxpayer go, and why show 5/5 as wins and then add a footnote to say that actually won was a fail?
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