Professional Passport’s CEO Crawford Temple has responded to the Government’s latest consultation on tackling tax avoidance that closed at midnight on August 29th.
“In this consultation HMRC has set out three main objectives – to deliver improved outcomes for workers by reducing the number of illegitimate operators in the umbrella market, to increase compliance to that businesses can operate on a level playing field and thirdly to protect the Exchequer from significant revenue losses that result from umbrella company non-compliance,” says Temple. “These objectives are to be applauded but none of the objectives will ever be achieved without significant investment in enforcement. Without enforcement, there is little, if any, incentive to play within the rules and the latest proposals provide no more than a road map for non-compliant providers to cleverly navigate and circumvent the rules.
“I have reiterated in my response that data that HMRC already holds would help to stamp out non-compliance and by tapping into this data, HMRC could identify recruitment companies that are failing to report, root out mini-umbrellas and spot disguised remuneration schemes,” he adds.
“Failure to use this data to proactively identify the perpetrators of these arrangements is negligent. HMRC is currently failing the market with its lack of enforcement measures and it is simply not good enough and without enforcement it will be difficult to ever level the playing field.”
