This week's opinion

‘We have also seen that encouraging more compliant behaviour does not always equate to increased revenue but rather improved accuracy thereby helping taxpayers pay the right amount of tax.’

So said HMRC chief executive Jon Thompson in correspondence with the House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee published last week. It is worth dissecting this statement because it is significant. The context is HMRC research on pre-population of returns information in the personal tax account. This has been a success and the department should be congratulated for what has been achieved: accuracy of tax returns has improved as a result. But as the proverb goes ‘be careful what you wish for’. HMRC’s assumption was that the error rate would fall and that the net effect of this would be that the tax take increased. In other words most errors made by taxpayers whose returns were not pre-populated...