Our business areas
HMRC’s Customer Compliance group plays a critical part in administering the UK’s tax system. It ensures a level playing field for the majority of businesses and individuals who pay their taxes on time and tackles both the small minority who do not pay on time and who deliberately try to cheat the system.
It’s a big job that requires a large number of staff with a range of professional expertise. Customer Compliance’s 22,000 staff include expert analysts, intelligence gatherers and tax professionals. It is also HMRC’s biggest group (bigger than most Whitehall departments), with staff in 120 locations in the UK and coverage of more than 100 countries worldwide.
Evasion is a key area of compliance activity for HMRC. Evasion is the deliberate omission, concealment or misrepresentation of information, or the false or deceptive presentation of information or circumstances to deliberately or fraudulently gain a tax advantage, either temporarily or permanently. As an evasion tax specialist you will be expected to understand and manage the risks to taxation, and undertake operational compliance work across the range of business taxes and duties managed by the Department by providing a well-targeted and appropriate response through a wide range of approaches from education and local support to undertaking detailed checks of returns giving rise to substantial financial and custodial penalties.
The Fraud Investigation Service (FIS) is HMRC’s counter-fraud organisation, with a clear statement of purpose: 'We protect funding for UK public services, investigating the most harmful tax cheats and ensuring no-one is beyond our reach'. We are targeted to raise or protect £5.21 billion of revenue and we aim to make maximum impact on serious fraud wherever we find it, regardless of how well resourced, organised or connected the fraudsters. To achieve these impacts, we need to develop new strategies and approaches, and to be increasingly innovative in our use of digital technology. We need to be seen as fair and even handed - whether we’re tackling offshore evaders, the individuals controlling organised crime, or the enablers and facilitators who support serious fraud in all its forms. We want the public, media and politicians to get our message that nobody is beyond our reach.
The Wealthy & Mid-sized Business Compliance (WMBC) delivers the department’s compliance effort for wealthy individuals, public bodies and mid-sized businesses (MSB). MSB have a turnover of between £10 million and £200 million and / or a minimum of 20 employees. This segment of HMRC’s population includes some of the UK’s fastest growing, most innovative and dynamic businesses in all trade sectors. Your role will be to support the delivery of the business by improving the extent to which individuals and businesses pay the tax due, strengthening mid-sized business customers’ experience of HMRC, changing customers’ behaviours towards compliance and contributing to the improvement of the business environment in this population.
The Individuals and Small Business Compliance (ISBC) directorate deals with HMRC's largest and most diverse group of customers, nearly 35 million individuals and businesses - the people who drive the UK's economy. It leads work tackling the hidden economy, international trade, and National Minimum Wage enforcement, and it hosts HMRC's anti money laundering supervision team. The directorate plays a key role in improving joint working across government, and in using data to inform and shape policy and operational responses
The Large Business (LB) directorate is responsible for over 2,000 of the largest businesses that pay a significant proportion of the total business taxes and duties that HMRC collects.
Working as a Tax Professional dealing with Large Business in HMRC is an exciting opportunity to play an integral part in ensuring that the right amount of UK tax revenues are collected whilst building constructive and productive relationships with the large corporates who are our key customers.
There is little or no evasion of taxes by large corporates, as it is not in their interests to suppress profits because of the impact on share price. But there is a big tax gap, caused by avoidance and disputes over how the law applies to specific and complex transactions. It is important to put that gap into context – large businesses pay around 60% of UK tax receipts but account for less than a quarter of the tax gap.
The HMRC approach to dealing with large business customers is based on an intensive relationship management approach which provides large businesses with certainty, clarity, proportionality and speed of resolution, underpinned by high levels of professionalism and commercial understanding.