Until recently, an HMRC investigation usually meant one of two things. Either someone, possibly disgruntled business partner or spurned spouse, had tipped off the taxman or you were unlucky enough to have had your tax return picked at random.
All that changed with the advent of HMRC Connect, an £80m software system designed to join billions of dots to create a picture of who may not be entirely honest when it comes to assessing their tax liabilities.
HMRC Connect obtains data from different sources including other government databases such as the Land Registry, DVLA and private sector financial information from credit card issuers and companies such as eBay, PayPal and Airbnb.
Years ago, inspectors and their assistants would take loads and loads of time manually cross-checking all of that information and then comparing it to the returns that came in from taxpayers to determine whether or not there was a risk those taxpayers were not paying the full amount of tax.
Nowadays that cross-checking takes practically no time at all, the preliminary work is done in seconds. What that does is to see if there are anomalies in the information that they’ve got from different places that flag up there is a risk on the taxpayer. The risk department then identifies those with highest risk and then investigates those people.
It quickly establishes links that enable experts to identify suspicious businesses, individuals and transactions for further investigation. It allows HMRC to see more information in one place for a single taxpayer and has the capacity to find anomalies between information such as bank interest, property income and other lifestyle indicators and compare it to what a customer is paying us in tax. Manually interrogating such data would take weeks or even months.
Whilst being extremely happy with Connect’s impressive successes date, HMRC is keen to develop the system further, particularly when it comes to reducing the burden on its staff. ‘Connect is not the sole deciding factor in beginning or deciding the direction of a tax investigation, it is simply a powerful tool that enable lots of different data sources to be brought together that will inform an overall picture. Other factors are brought in, including human insight to make the final judgement’ HMRC says.
Another opportunity for Connect is to use its capabilities for pre-fill tax returns based on data already known about the individual. By confronting taxpayers with information that they are merely asked to check and confirm, HMRC hopes to significantly reduce fraud and increase the tax take, and no doubt the rollout of mandatory Making Tax Digital will be a trigger for even more compliance activity as digital data pours in.
