Request
Please can you provide the following information for the five most recently available years:
A
The number of tax investigations commenced by the Comptroller of Taxes.
B
The number of tax investigations which were closed with no additional tax assessed.
C
The amount of additional tax assessed as a result of tax investigations.
D
The amount of tax penalties levied or additional settlements reached as a result of tax investigations.
E
The cost of operating the tax investigations team (salaries and readily identifiable direct costs).
F
The number of tax fraud cases referred to the attorney general.
G
The number of successful prosecutions for tax fraud.
Response
A
In the past, the “commenced date” was not consistently captured and / or recorded, and due to the current transformation programme, the department is focused on clearing the “stock” of investigations (historic, and previous year’s cases).
It is however possible to provide the “settled” date for each year in question.
The table below shows the number of cases “settled” for the last five most recently available years.
| N° of Investigations cases settled |
|---|
| 2018 | 144 |
| 2017 | 175 |
| 2016 | 201 |
| 2015 | 69 |
| 2014 | 47 |
| Total | 636 |
B
The requested information is not held.
C
| Amount of additional tax assessed as a result of Investigation |
|---|
| 2018 | £1,577,831.72 |
| 2017 | £882,115.57 |
| 2016 | £1,606,460.06 |
| 2015 | £617,217.00 |
| 2014 | £308,301.00 |
| Total | £4,991,925.35 |
D
| Amount of tax penalties levied or additional settlements |
|---|
| 2018 | £98,705.04 |
| 2017 | £69,207.03 |
| 2016 | £62,569.95 |
| 2015 | £214,198.00 |
| 2014 | £93,686.00 |
| Total | £538,366.02 |
E
The Taxes Office undertakes a range of compliance activities and interventions including, for example, GST audits; desk-based business accounts inspections; processing of and enquiry into Voluntary Disclosures; and fuller investigations into the accuracy of personal tax returns. Together these have raised around £8 million in additional tax revenues during 2018.
Resources are deployed flexibly according to risk. During 2018 many tax officers have been redeployed towards work on the Building Revenue Jersey Transformation Programme, in particular to help design, test and install the new Revenue Management System.
During 2018 fewer than four staff years of activity have been deployed into investigations into tax returns where serious levels of error, carelessness or deliberate tax avoidance or evasion may have been in play - at a cost of around £250,000.
F
No tax fraud cases have been referred by the Comptroller to the Attorney General for consideration of criminal prosecution. The Taxes Office supported the States Police in bringing one successful criminal prosecution in 2016. Except in the most egregious cases, it is the Comptroller’s policy generally to handle tax evasion as a civil matter. The new Revenue Administration Law, lodged alongside Budget 2019, will modernise approaches towards tax investigations and enable Revenue Jersey to treat more cases civilly and in a more standardised and transparent way.
G
Nil.
