Photo: ToabiIn the October 1^st edition of City AM, Juliet Samuel offers kind advice on how to avoid paying taxes on your “untaxed funds” (that is, money that you've lied to the tax authorities about). It turns out that HMRC [Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs] have offered an amnesty for precisely this crime.

Apparently, it is very expensive to prosecute tax evaders and very rarely do successful prosecutions land significant amounts of money, so the HMRC has simply decided to ask for volunteers to come clean and declare their previously undeclared earnings.

City AM, gracefully provides an example of how anyone with £10 million undeclared income in Lichtenstein could benefit from this. If you, in June 1990 deposited £10 million in Lichtenstein from some undeclared source and this money today is worth £20 million, you would normally have to pay around £14 million in taxes on interest and of course the original 40% income tax, plus a fine of around £3.2 million. However, with the amnesty, if you agree to pay £3.2 million in taxes plus a penalty of £0.2 million, you can now have amnesty from future prosecution. Thus, you can save about £14 million and sleep easier at night in your million pound mansion knowing that the HMRC is not after you.

Not everything is song and dance in tax dodger land, however. In spite of this generous offer, only 419 people registered in the first six months of the offer (the number in the past six months is rumoured to be around twice that), as opposed to the around 5,000 British investors holding £2-3 billion between them in accounts there (that is, half a million each on average). Law firm DLA Piper partner Simon Airey thinks that this might be because the deal has not been publicised enough by the HMRC. So, we can presume that City AM is lending a hand now.

It is not hard to understand why the HMRC has kept quiet about their offer of amnesty for rich tax dodgers with million pound tax accounts in tax havens. At a time when the government is introducing austerity measures in the public sector and benefits, giving tax breaks for the rich squares badly with the idea that “we are all in this together”. It exposes who really will have to pay for the bank-bailouts. If you are rich and fiddle the books to hide millions from the tax authorities, you get amnesty. If you are poor and unemployed, you get your benefits taken off you. Suddenly, socialism seems like a pretty good idea.