MP’s blast HMRC over corporate tax collections

So much for George Osborne’s war on debt.

A select group of MP’s has blasted Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC or the taxman to you and I) for failing to get after big business and get the tax from them that they should legally be paying.

While the unemployed, the sick and the disabled continue to be subject to endless government scrutiny and opprobrium – HMRC wasn’t able to collect what it was owed last year – collecting less money in real terms than it did the year before and failing to collect a trifling £35 billion it should have done (up from the £33.8 billion it couldn’t get at last year)

This seems extraordinarily lax from a government so exercised by the public finances and debt reduction – but it clearly believes that harassing benefit claimants is more cost effective than collecting taxes from big business.

Of course the ‘gap’ figure between what the government is owed (tax evasion) and what it collects is a mere trifle compared with the money that huge corporates dodge paying in tax via elaborate offshore tax operations (tax avoidance).

One can only conclude that in truth this government is far less vexed about reducing debt than it I in maintaining a neoliberal paradise for huge corporations to extract wealth from the countries they operate in.