Have you heard the latest story about HM Revenue and Customs – they are hunting high and low and in every corner and crevice for ‘lost’ tax revenue in the UK? Not content with threatening people with prison or fines for blatant tax evasion, they are now out to get those who may inadvertently have paid the wrong tax or misfiled their tax return!
As part of their crackdown for example, they have written to 28,000 doctors to double check that they are behaving appropriately when it comes to their taxes, and not employing spouses just for the sake of offsetting a bit of tax! These new measures are very hit and miss – they smack of a lumbering hunter using a blunderbuss to shoot something, anything that moves on the off chance that it’s a duck rather than just a leaf on a tree! And to us, the measures are just more reasons for Brits to move abroad and bank and manage their money offshore and out of the tax net in the UK.
If you’re onshore and resident for tax purposes in the UK you have a liability to taxation. We all know this, and the vast majority of British citizens abide by the rules. They fill in their tax return as honestly as they can, (restricted often only by the confusing nature of the forms!), and pay up because they want to sleep at night, not really because of some intrinsic moral belief that the world is a truly better place thanks to taxes. But this is not enough for the taxman who’s seeing his coffers ever shrinking thanks to massive increases in unemployment – no, indeed not, the taxman is now on the hunt for lost revenue from people’s genuine mistakes and don’t think you’re safe – because you’re probably not!
The taxman is interrogating the land registry to spot spikes in sales and purchases of property in case there are those out there ‘trading’ in real estate and not paying income tax. He’s after health professionals who might be offsetting their tax liability by employing a spouse to help out in general practice surgery. The taxman will be looking at you if you have more than one home to see if you’re declaring likely income from your additional properties, and he is sniffing out ‘missing’ tax revenue wherever he can.
This may sound like HMRC working hard and working well for the honest people in Great Britain who shouldn’t have to face tax increases just because there is less in the pot thanks to people evading their liability. But it’s not! As stated above, the vast majority of citizens pay their dues because it is too hard not to – and you cannot sleep well with the threat of fines or prison hanging over you either. What this is really about is the fact that there are those in HMRC who are fearful for their jobs in a climate where everyone is cutting labour, so they are making work for themselves – and it’s about a country which is in such dire financial straits that there is not enough money to pay for the basics such as education, healthcare and infrastructure maintenance, so tax revenue has to be found somewhere to keep paying to plug up the deficit hole.
If you’re an honest Brit all this does is reinforce the resentment that is palpable nowadays. We bailed out the banks and bankrupted the country. There is no money to pay for schools to improve. There is no money to plough into the NHS which is so badly in need of funding that people are dying every single day when they should be being looked after properly. And there is no money to fill the potholes in the crumbling roads. The going is not good in the UK, which is why we are experiencing an increase in correspondence from those who are planning a move overseas.
No longer are people living under some sort of illusion that it’s 100% better abroad – everyone knows the pound is so weak it won’t necessarily afford you a great life overseas – but at the same time, people seem to be taking control of their destinies and going to live overseas so that at least they have more say in how their lives are lived. If you feel the same, if you’re fed up of the lack of control you have over the way your tax money is spent and over the way your hard earned income is divided between your bank account and that of Alistair Darling, you can take decisive action and move overseas too.
Depending on where you move to and your personal circumstances, you can live tax-free in countries as diverse and fascinating as Belize, Malaysia or Dubai for example – and you can certainly choose to live in a country where less of your income is taken in tax and where you have more freedom over how you manage your own financial affairs. The good thing about being British is that we have choice, a valuable passport and the ability to move abroad when we’ve had enough!
