Offshore non-compliance - podcast

The CIOT has recorded a podcast on the topic of offshore avoidance with Dave Hartnett.  Podcast here and transcript here.  Previous items on a similar theme can be found here.

Dodgy Dave's comments on the HMRC advertising campagin for the NDO are noteworthy. Evidently, Dave has been supping at the cup of corporate blather and is now minded to claim that his video got a huge amount of hits. 

Huge, he tells us.  A random survey puts the video at having receiving no more than 50,000 hits before the Revenue removed it from view (although, if you really must, the Torygraph continues to oblige here).  Which, in YouTube terms, is tiny, and that is even before you exclude the 49,900 tax experts who  just had to see with their own eyes how wretched it was. 

And how appropriate was it to have used YouTube as a medium for this activity ?  Well, monkey smells finger comes in at ten times as many hits than Dave and sneezing baby panda (aaah, how cute is that) with 46 million hits can teach Dave a thing, or three, about huge.  (And,  in passing, with  the  indefatiguable Jean Newlove having now finally given up in her campaign for justice for her daughter, here is the obligatory festive Kirsty. She died nine years ago today.)

Moving on from the NDO, and let's be frank, most  tax experts have, indeed, long since so done, other topics touched upon are the LDF, naming and shaming, and the latest proposal for mandatory notification to HMRC of newly opened offshore bank accounts contained in this condoc. 

With the new year heralding the bedding down of the new penalties regime, a continuation of the assault on professionals, and HMRC becoming ever more belligerent in the exercise of its powers, the prognosis for 2010 is not good.