Government Dismisses PAC Recommendations
According to minutes from a recent meeting, the government has dismissed a number of recommendations from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC). The recommendations relate to issues such as the tax gap and the way HMRC accounts are reported.
Specifically, the PAC suggested that the government should be more transparent about the alleged limitations of the current system for measuring the tax gap, as well as gathering a larger amount of intelligence about tax avoidance.
However, the government dismissed the recommendations, claiming that the measure of the tax gap is not intended to be an estimate of how much more tax would be gathered if changes were made to the law. It is, quite simply, the difference between tax due and tax collected.
The PAC has previously made recommendations such as that HMRC should more aggressively pursue big companies who avoid paying UK tax. However, the PAC has also come under criticism, chiefly for the abrasive way in which it conducts many of its affairs.