The cost of untaxed wealth

George Bangham wrote for the New Statesman about how the debate around wealth taxes is neglecting to ask: how well are we already collecting taxes on wealth?

“HMRC’s historically poor performance in enforcing existing wealth taxes is due to a combination of low resourcing, poor data integration and skewed incentives. Resourcing is a major challenge: HMRC staff are outgunned. Fewer than 1,000 tax officers oversee 850,000 ​‘wealthy’ taxpayers. Most of these staff are generalists without deep expertise in the technical aspects of wealth taxes. Meanwhile, over 70 per cent of wealth taxpayers communicate with the tax authority via professional advisers rather than directly like most of us. This puts HMRC staff at a disadvantage.”

Read the full article