As prosecutions of aggressive tax scheme promoters remain conspicuously low, a dramatic shift in law to alter the need for proof of dishonesty is still not viable, says Kingsley Napley’s David Sleight
The government and HMRC have been pledging to clamp down on enablers and promoters of aggressive tax avoidance strategies for years. In recent times it has been hard to keep up with the plethora of measures and legislation brought in to stop these ‘unscrupulous advisers’.
In March 2020 the Spring Budget promised a package of measures to tackle the promoters of tax avoidance schemes, while HMRC published a new tax avoidance strategy which pledged to ‘use the full range of criminal powers and civil sanctions to tackle those enablers who fraudulently design, promote or market tax schemes that facilitate tax evasion, or who fail to prevent the facilitation of tax evasion’.
Now further proposals and legislation which form part of the draft Finance Bill 2020-21 have been released for consultation. This includes a series of legislative changes to existing anti-avoidance regimes such as the Promoters of Tax Avoidance Scheme (POTAS) and Disclosure of Tax Avoidance Schemes (DOTAS), promising once more to ‘clamp down on the market for tax avoidance’.
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