Normally HMRC carries out an average 78,000 tax investigations a quarter, but the latest figures showed that 93,000 cases were opened in the last quarter alone.

With an extra £1.4bn given to HMRC to help fund tax investigations and hire more compliance staff, tax experts at Pinsent Masons warned this will see ‘HMRC’s more aggressive compliance push continue’.

Rachel Reeves told business leaders at the CBI conference on 25 November: ‘If we want to tackle fraud in HMRC, then I’m told we’ve got to put a load more money in to have people who are manually chasing up these cases, rather than investing in technology to root out that fraud.’

As well as the number of HMRC investigations increasing, the level of prosecutions reached a three-year high of 300 in the first nine months of this year. This was up 19% compared to the same period in 2023 when there were only 252 prosecutions, but there is still only less than one per cent of cases actually reaching the courts.