HMRC puts 200 billionaires on UK tax crackdown hitlist

The UK’s tax authority is assigning dedicated “customer compliance managers” to more than 200 billionaires as part of a crackdown meant to raise £500m for the public purse.

HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) said it had for the first time compiled a list of billionaires who are required to pay tax in the UK, regardless of whether they formally live in the country, to tackle a “wealthy tax gap” caused by those who do not pay what they ought.

In an announcement after Wednesday’s budget, the authority said it was allocating a customer compliance manager (CCM) to each billionaire with a UK tax footprint, whose complex tax affairs are often hard for HMRC to manage.

“Billionaires can present a particular example of this, with affairs often spanning multiple taxes, entities and jurisdictions and a greater need for early and coordinated engagement,” HMRC said.

It said the managers would offer voluntary discussions to each billionaire before they filed their taxes, to “help build a shared understanding of the customers’ UK tax affairs and make subsequent engagement more focused and proportionate”.

The authority also plans to start deploying new tech to monitor wealthy individuals – defined as those with income of more than £200,000 or assets over £2m in any of the last three years – involving “advanced analytics, automated triggers and artificial intelligence (AI) to identify emerging risks earlier and target compliance activity where it will have greatest impact”.

It is part of wider efforts to tackle the wealthy tax gap, whereby rich people are failing to pay what they should if all of their assets were disclosed to the tax authority. The wealthy tax gap for 2024-25 was estimated to be worth £3.6bn, equivalent to 6% of the total tax gap across the UK’s entire tax-paying population.

The tax authority said its actions would contribute at least £500m towards a larger commitment to raise £10bn of additional tax revenues by 2030.

HMRC was grilled in July last year by MPs on the parliamentary public accounts committee over its lack of understanding of tax compliance by about 1.3 million wealthy taxpayers.

Adam Craggs, the head of tax, investigations and financial crime at the law firm RPC, said anyone with more than £200,000 of annual income, or net assets above £2m, should now “reflect on how clearly they understand and can evidence their UK tax position and their interaction with HMRC”.