Reinventing the wheel?

AS CHANGE SEEMS inevitable these days and dinosaurs are not allowed in the workplace it is hardly surprising to see that HMRC are reinventing the wheel. In a refreshing breath of common sense they have decided to create a number of new investigation units to handle the huge number of investigation cases that will be produced from the actions of the Offshore Fraud Project Group (OFPG) in Bootle.

Recent Special Commissioner decisions (e.g. SpC 517 533 536 and 537) have confirmed that tens of thousands of UK residents have been identified to HMRC as having offshore accounts or debit/credit cards. The action of the OFPG is producing hard evidence of the existence of offshore accounts directly linked to UK residents and the scale of these developments was outlined recently in the article 'Trouble in paradise' (see Taxation 29 May 2006 page 214).

Which route...