£45m cyber tax attack

I’ve been warning clients for years about the dangers of a tax investigation and developed a service to protect and support clients.

Many think that the whole point of the Self Assessment tax system (which was introduced in 1997) is to focus more resources on tax investigations. It is common knowledge that the taxman sometimes spys on businesses before it attacks them.

In the old days Tax Inspectors counted the number of people visiting a business and used this information to check the sales. If the bookkeeping didn’t show all the sales for that day then the taxman would argue that this was the case for everyday. The problem is that when the taxman spots a mistake you are on the back foot.

Today the taxman has access to lots of information and they are now spying on people using technology.  HMRC’s crawler technology is based upon an elaborate (almost militarised) £45m computer system designed by leading defence contractor BAE Systems. The software is supposed to work by creating ‘spidergrams’ of people’s social media and email habits, then analysing their shapes to determine likelihood of offences.

If you want to make sure you are covered, call me about our Tax Investigation Service.