All other announcements about enforcement and compliance.
A consultation is being undertaken during 2010, on the taxation of employment-related shares and securities, where geared growth arrangements are used. The aim of the consultation is to develop proposals to ensure that employment income from employment related securities is subject to income tax and National Insurance Contributions.
The Government will be taking action to prevent efforts to avoid tax and National Insurance Contributions (NICs) on earnings provided through the use of trusts and other vehicles.
Employers and employees are entering into arrangements using trusts and other vehicles that seek to avoid, defer or reduce liabilities to income tax and NICs on earnings or that seek to avoid restrictions on pensions tax relief. Arrangements in some cases seek to rely on the use of complex intermediary structures, some of which may be offshore.
The Government is considering options for tackling these arrangements, including those which seek to avoid the restrictions on tax relief for pension schemes, and intends to introduce legislation in due course to take effect from 6 April 2011.
This measure makes changes to the compliance checking framework for excise duties, covering information and inspection powers, record-keeping rules and time limits. It will amend current legislation covering record-keeping, time limits and information and inspection powers.
A first consultation on excise modernisation and compliance checks was published in July 2009. The second consultation, published at the Pre-Budget Report 2009, listed the responses and proposed updating the existing compliance checking framework which is mainly in the Customs and Excise Management Act 1979.
Draft legislation to supplement that consultation was published on 14 January 2010 and a summary of responses to that consultation together with an impact assessment were published on 24 March 2010. A final Impact Assessment is being published today, 22 June 2010.
Following a successful pilot exercise in 2009-10, HMRC will use Debt Collection Agencies during 2010-11 to provide it with additional capacity to pursue and collect tax debts.
As part of HMRC's debt strategy all debts are risk assessed and in-house resources are focused first on the highest risk and highest value debts.
This additional capacity will accelerate the collection of lower value tax debts and generate an additional £140million from debts that might otherwise be written off.
