An average household will pay £826,030 in direct and indirect taxes over a lifetime, with the total increasing by 2.7% in 2014-2015 compared to the previous year, according to figures compiled by the TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA)

The Upper Tribunal has referred questions to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in a long-running case involving the VAT status of dental care plan payments, saying it needs clarification of whether the services provided are excluded from exemption on the grounds they are ‘debt collection’

The introduction of the common reporting standard (CRS) creates a degree of confusion over consistency with FATCA compliance, warns Laila Arstall is advocate and counsel at Carey Olsen

HMRC has set up a number of webinars and face-to-face events to provide agents and tax advisers with the opportunity to find out more about the move to digital tax accounts and ask questions on the long awaited Making Tax Digital (MTD) rollout, currently out for consultation

Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, has written a letter addressed to the Apple community in Europe, following a ruling by the European Commission calling on Ireland to recover up to €13bn (£11bn) in tax from the tech giants

The European Commission is calling on Ireland to recover up to €13bn (£11bn) from Apple, after its investigation concluded Irish tax deals with the technology giant amounted to illegal state aid, with Apple paying an effective corporation tax rate as low as 0.005% in some years

HMRC has announced three consultations on proposals to tackle the hidden economy, which include wider data gathering powers, the requirement for some businesses to register for tax purposes in order to access to licenses or services, and new sanctions for compliance failures

MPs are calling on the new Chancellor, Philip Hammond, to reinstate distributional analysis of the effects of Budget and Autumn Statement measures in order to increase the transparency about the impact of tax changes, describing the move a year ago to drop these reports as a mistake and branding the replacement reports as ‘inadequate’

Bill Dodwell, senior partner and head of tax policy at Deloitte casts his expert eye over digital tax accounts for individuals and small businesses

The Chancellor Philip Hammond has appointed three new non-executive directors to the board of the Office of Tax Simplification (OTS), with the aim of adding experience from academia, taxation policy and business to the body which is being put on a statutory footing in the Finance Bill 2016

Parents that receive child benefit and child tax credits have been reminded by HMRC to update their child’s educational status after GCSE results were released to ensure that they continue to receive the correct payments

Mid-sized businesses have described how difficulty in finding information and criticisms about the quality of information provided by HMRC adversely affects their relationship with the tax authority