Ritchie and the Tax Journal

You might recall that the Tax Journal had a little survey on who agreed with Murph over the tax gap etc. The results are in:

The UK should not have a general anti-avoidance rule, according to two thirds of respondents to a Tax Journal online survey. More than 300 of the 400 respondents did not agree that legal tax avoidance should be regarded as part of the ‘tax gap’.

Six out of ten said they believed that the government is doing enough to tackle avoidance, and a similar proportion considered that HMRC should not be given further resources, in addition to those already announced, to tackle the tax gap. Half of the respondents said the avoidance scheme disclosure rules had been effective in reducing avoidance.

…

He has criticised the widely-quoted estimates produced by Richard Murphy and claimed that Murphy’s methodology was ‘deeply and systematically flawed’.

Readers were asked whose was the better estimate of the tax gap. While 166 favoured HMRC’s estimate of £42 billion and 83 favoured Murphy’s estimate of £120 billion, a further 151 readers said that both were ‘wrong’.