Penalties: the cognitive revolution and common myths

Like many people I have found one of the few advantages of the last year to be more opportunity to read. Two very different books have been: Sapiens – a brief history of humankind by Yuval Noah Harari (hereafter Sapiens); and Evaluation of HMRC’s implementation of powers obligations and safeguards introduced since 2012 by HMRC (hereafter the Evaluation).

Perhaps as a result of many years dealing with enquiries from both sides of the fence and looking for common ground between HMRC and taxpayers I suggest there might be some overlap between the two works. This may not be immediately obvious but both look at rapid change over a period of time (although the timescale for Sapiens is in millennia with the Evaluation limiting itself to a more modest couple of decades) and both rely on a premise (the former explicitly the latter implicitly) that social...