In total, 540,000 cases were enabled through HMCR’s use of Connect data in 2024-25, bringing in £4.6bn in tax in a single year, according to a freedom of information request by law firm Pinsent Masons.

This figure was up 35% on the annual average of £3.4bn that HMRC has collected from Connect-enabled tax investigations in recent years.

First launched back in 2010, Connect is a powerful data analysis tool that draws on multiple data sources, including third parties and merchant acquirer data, but it does not look at individual’s browser history or emails.

Connect captures information from multiple data sources and builds networks from this data ‘allowing HMRC to see patterns and links in the mass of data, that would be impossible for the human eye to spot, enabling the quick and efficient interrogation of information from a wide range of both internal and external data sources’.

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