This is the reality of all the pledges to ‘go after tax dodgers’. HMRC knows that those offshore billionaires could have them tied up in legal knots for years. They’re only human, they have targets (doesn’t everyone now), so they’ll go for the low-hanging fruit, no matter that some of it is crushed underfoot. In this case, it’s the thousands of contractors whose accountants recommended what was then a legal tax avoidance scheme, which was later decided to be not so legal. Meanwhile, on various yachts in the Cayman Islands…
“HMRC scraps plans to tax pensions after death”
A couple of other Statement Highlights (in my world, anyway). A welcome ‘nothing happened’ on the treatment of pensions on death. They were never going to be liable to IHT (too complicated with trusts and trust law) but there was talk of making them income-taxable on the recipients at whatever age you die.
