Taxpayers need properly articulated legal rights, according to barrister Jonathan Schwarz at yesterday evening's ICAEW Tax Faculty's Hardman Memorial lecture on Revenue & Customs' powers. He said that the professional bodies were wrong to have supported the Revenue's taxpayers' charter process. In a hard-hitting address, Schwarz - a member of the Tax Faculty's large business and international tax committee - said that the proposed taxpayers' charter was not adequate for safeguarding taxpayers' rights, and that any charter should be overseen by an independent committee. He said there was an authoritarian drift in the Revenue's new powers. 'Rights cannot be contained in an aspirational document,' he told the invited audience. 'Rights need to be properly endorsed by parliament.' Schwarz said that a taxpayers' charter has constitutional significance because it sends out a signal about what sort of society we want to live in. 'As a child growing up in South Africa,' he said, 'we constantly looked to Great Britain as the beacon of how things should be done.' He said that this role was being eroded by the serious curtailment of personal freedoms that the Revenue's new powers created. Schwarz, who is a barrister at Temple Tax Chambers, said that the combined Revenue and Customs meant that it had far too broad a jurisdiction, having to deal with in some cases criminal cases, which should be dealt with by the police. One area of concern, he said, was the lack of safeguards for information being passed to suspect regimes. Among other things, he called for a taxpayers' charter of rights to be enacted by parliament; a review of powers and administration of the tax laws by an independent committee or commission; and for the new tribunal system to bed in thoroughly before asking it to supervise untested legislation that inherently impinges on fundamental rights. It was reported that at least one representative of the Revenue present was very shaken by the strength of the views expressed.