Where Does It Go? – UK Money Blog £

One aspect of the 2009 budget was a initiative to make people pay their taxes more by threatening to “name and shame” them on the HMSC website.

The budget report states:

Legislation will be introduced, to be bought into effect by Treasury Order, enabling HM Revenue & Customs to publish the names and details of individuals and companies who are penalised for deliberate defaults on or after 1 April 2010 leading to a loss of tax of more than £25,000.

What could be better disincentive for an upright British gentleman businessman, dependent on his reputation, than to avoid having his name splashed across a virtual “naughty step”?

This could be a nod to the public outrage over pensions and such like, angry at the notion of rich bankers suspected of playing the system and so avoiding paying their fair share of tax. This is in addition to a pretty much purely symbolic of adding a 50% tax bracket on the £150,000 bracket – a move that will only bring in £1billion worth of income, small fry compared with the huge sums of ever increasing debt the UK faces for the next 10 years.

The “name and shame” scheme has already been tried in Ireland to good effect, improving tax revenues.

Why not just tie them to the village green stocks and supply free rotten tomatoes to the public – such a move I’m sure would add 10 points to their opinion polls overnight!

Read it for yourself at the hm-treasury website – this is where YOUR money is being spent, you have a right to know where!

Financial Statement and Budget Report

* Chapter A (PDF 307KB)
* Chapter B (PDF 488KB)
* Chapter C (PDF 436KB)
* Lists of abbreviations, charts and tables (PDF 49KB)

Where does it all go? Well, tax wise at the moment, it goes into paying for bankers mistakes, with the Government, who are at least partly responsible for not foreseeing the problem in the first place, now bailing out the banks bad debts with your money.

And now it turns out that the Banks were not only guilty of mismanaging their business but avoiding paying their fair share of tax whilst they were making billion £’s worth of profit. Allegedly.

The Guardian recently found evidence that Barclays had been busy creating companies in low-tax countries such as Brazil and Luxembourg. Allegedly.

These documents were published on the Guardian website, only to have a judge phone up at 2am demanding they are taken down, and in so doing generating even more publicity around the story than would have happened.

This take down order has now been ratified by a judge, in a chilling blow for free speech in the UK.

The confidential leaked documents describe how SCM, Barclays‘ structured capital markets division, allegedly planned to use more than £11bn of loans to create hundreds of millions of pounds of tax benefits, via “an elaborate circuit of Cayman Islands companies, US partnerships and Luxembourg subsidiaries”.

The tax benefits for Barclays are said to be in the region of £1billion a year, although this is unverified.

And so, Techcrunch in the US, has managed to publish the documents, in solidarity for free speech around the world. Here is the information Barclays do not want you to see:

Barclays Confidential Tax Avoidance Documents

Alleged evidence of Barclays tax avoidance documents:
Barclays Tax Avoidance – Lux
Barclays Tax Avoidance – Knight
Barclays Tax Avoidance – Valiha
Barclays Tax Avoidance – Brazil
Barclays Tax Avoidance – Berry
Barclays Tax Avoidance – Faber
Barclays Tax Avoidance – Brontos