Labour’s Plans to Invest in Recruitment of More Tax Investigators.

It has been fully publicised and Labour have been fully up front about their plans to invest £555 million in HMRC to fund the recruitment of more tax inspectors, to focus on more complex tax avoidance and tax evasion cases.

Labour’s intention is that this plan will raise £0.7 billion in 2025/26, increasing to £5.1 billion a year by the end of the next Parliamentary term. 

Their plans are said to cover more complex area of tax evasion, however it is likely that they will continue to target the “little man” trading either as a sole trader or limited company – often following HMRC’s own internal information gathering and comparisons to tax returns, so that all cases are guaranteed to yield some extra tax. – the easier route! 

They state that they will be increasing the number of compliance officers by 5,000 – all of whom need to be trained and this takes time. Poorly trained officers have a negative effect on the outcome of any enquiry and can drag it out by constant  referrals to other internal  departments or senior officers and there are many newbies out there with little knowledge of the full range of technical tax issues. 

So we wait and see if any of this comes into fruition, to help those that hope to be the  government of the future fund the NHS and other services in need.