A gentle nudge on overseas assets

As most practitioners with clients holding offshore assets will know there is a wide variety of tools and strategies at HMRC’s disposal to pursue whatever tax it believes is owed. These range from informal inquiries all the way to strict liability criminal offences and knowing how each works can be essential.

A relatively new tool in HMRC’s box is the nudge letter a tactic made possible in its most recent incarnation by the adoption of the Common Reporting Standard (CRS) in 2017 and the subsequent sharing of information by and to HMRC from across the globe.

HMRC now has the capacity through its data matching tool Connect to cross match a vast number of its own and third-party data items to identify anomalies arising from relationships and patterns between individuals organisations and information. This combined with behavioural science techniques aimed...