Flickr/gyverchangphotos. Some rights reserved.
Judging by the froth from last week’s hearings, debates and news reports about HSBC, Lord Green, and HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), you might think that lots of new facts had emerged. But much of it was old news. Private Eye has been reporting HSBC's delinquency under Stephen Green for years. And the U.K.'s agreement with Switzerland, signed in 2011 by Treasury minister David Gauke, and by Dave Hartnett, then HMRC permanent secretary, was denounced as a sell-out at the time by the Tax Justice Network. It has troubled the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) under Margaret Hodge, from the outset, (along with Hartnett's involvement in the Tax affairs of Vodaphone and Goldman Sachs).
The fresh news was the confirmation of the Swiss bank’s active promotion of tax “mitigation” strategies for depositors; and confirmation of HMRC’s light-touch response to the whole business. So wider media attention has finally been drawn to the frailty of HMRC’s compliance capacity following the department's emasculation in recent decades; and also to the capture of tax policy-making by big money and its servants. Lin Homer, head of HMRC since 2012, told the PAC last week that her department is doing "a good and effective job" in policing tax avoidance and evasion. She defended its prosecution policy on the basis of “cost-effectiveness”, the higher burden of proof in criminal trials, and the resource-intensive nature of prosecutions. However, as pointed out by members of the PAC, and now by former Director of Public Prosecutions, Kier Starmer, a policy of hardly ever prosecuting people hiding money abroad is no deterrent at all.
