Understanding corporate criminal offence compliance

The corporate criminal offence (CCO) is common shorthand for two ‘corporate offences of failure to prevent the criminal facilitation of tax evasion’ that were introduced as part of the Criminal Finances Act of 2017. The first offence covers the evasion of UK taxes and the second covers the evasion of overseas taxes. By ‘overseas taxes’ we are talking about evasion of another jurisdiction’s taxes not using overseas jurisdictions to evade UK taxes.

Diagram 1 is a neat demonstration of the two offences. It is important to remember that we are talking about tax evasion here the deliberate and dishonest concealment under-declaration or under-payment of taxes and duties. It’s not about carelessness or negligence. The UK tax evasion offence is for HMRC to investigate while the overseas offence is for the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) or wider law enforcement to investigate. For most of this article...