Tax advisers make money from advising on tax avoidance schemes?
From an article on the Accountacy Age website it appears that HMRC are accusing tax advisers of making half their money from ’selling’ tax avoidance schemes. I suspect this might cause a few rude comments by tax advisers and their representative bodies.
HMRC made similar accusations about tax advisers, and even wrote to representative bodies about it, two or three years ago in relation to Missing Trader Intra-Community (MTIC) fraud. They didn’t provide any facts to back up their claim, and as far as I am aware didn’t make any complaints to the relevant monitoring body.
Most tax advisers are probably too busy trying to help clients get their tax right to have time to dream up schemes and sell them to their clients. Most clients today appear to want to avoid schemes and just want to keep within the rules, whilst paying no more tax than they have to.
Apparently groundless accusations like this do nothing for the prospect of there being an improvement in the level of trust and respect that advisers have for HMRC.
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