Cheating the public revenue ?

With all the recent talk about our troughing MPs and fraud, we got to thinking.

Fraud is one of those expressions which, whilst in the everyday lexicon, did not exist as a criminal offence until 2006 when the Fraud Act came into force. Before then, and often since also, one has to turn to alternatives in the criminal law, such as theft.

In the world of serious tax irregularities, fraud is almost invariably used to describe the more heinous of civil offences, which do not lead to criminal prosecution but, rather, a punitive financial settlement between the taxpayer and the state. Where the Revenue and Customs Prosecution Office, the specialist government prosecution department, does, on the rare occasion, commence the criminal prosecution of a non-taxpayer, they continue to pursue an indictment for the common law offence of cheating, or more precisely, the offence of cheating the public revenue. This tends to be the case even where a prosecution could be brought under the Fraud Act or one of a handful  of specific statutory tax offence relating to income tax or VAT.

With criminal prosecutions for tax evasion being rare, and reserved either for the seriously stupid, or those possessed of special status, advisers specialising in tax law tend not to pay much mind to what happens when someone finds themselves being prosecuted. The grubby world of the criminal law is best avoided by right thinking professionals. And, in any event, the non-taxpayer is as good as guaranteed to be found guilty, even when possessed of the best legal representation that money can buy, as Messrs Dimsey and Allen can attest.

For these reasons, we have never stopped to think much about the nature of the offence, except to think it has a nice, meaty Dickensian ring to it and to assume that the “revenue” meant, specifically, the Inland Revenue or HM Customs & Excise and, latterly, HM Revenue & Customs. Put another way, it was an offence of cheating the taxman.

But, no. The revenue, or the public revenue, means the money at the disposal of the Crown, i.e., the government.

Interestingly, the offence of cheating the public revenue requires no loss to have been suffered by the state The offence is, rather, a conduct offence, and can include any form of fraudulent conduct which results in diverting money from the public coffers.

Whilst other statutory offences might also have been committed, there is no express bar on a prosecution for cheating the public revenue in such instances and, indeed, parliament has chosen not to replace or repeal the common law on two occasions in recent decades when other theft or fraud related laws were enacted, the most recent being only in 2006. As such, MPs must think the common law offence is worth keeping and that it should be used.

So, for those MPs who, in everyday speak, have been caught for ripping us off, have they not been cheating the public purse ?

The view expressed by the courts, as recently as 1987, was that the common law offence of cheating is in practice reserved for serious and unusual offences rather than conventional cases. Surely, MPs claiming for the interest on a non- existent mortgage is serious, unusual and non conventional ?

The maximum sentence for those found guilty of cheating the public revenue is life imprisonment and an unlimited fine, being a far more severe sentence than applies under the statutory offences enacted by parliament.  And when MPs have shown they cannot be trusted, it must be more appropriate that they are tried for an offence created by the courts rather than by MPs.

Comments

[D'Almert]

I cannot believe this will work!