I’ve posted before about all the ways HMRC can find out what you’re up to.
I’ve also said that in the budget last year Rachel Reeves said HMRC were adding 5,000 compliance officers to the workforce.
You also know that I was on the radio yesterday where I reminded people about this.
Yesterday after the show one of my regular listeners dropped me a message and did some maths on the new recruits and what they could do if they use AI to hoover up all the data they have on you.
5,000 people reviewing 8 taxpayers a day, doing 250 days a year would be able to review 10,000,000 tax returns.
To put this another way that is EVERY SINGLE RETURN that currently get’s submitted.
Now let’s rewind. There are a couple of problems with the maths. This assumes they pick up and finish a job within an hour. That’s not going to happen. It also ignores the fact that some enquiries will open a complete can of worms which take months if not years to deal with.
To counter this though most people have very little on there so they could probably review them even without AI.
The main issue though is pooling all of the data in to a single place. This is where Making Tax Digital comes in. For anyone with untaxed income you will soon have to submit four quarterly updates a year.
You will soon have to link software up to HMRC with what they want to be a two way interface. Yes that means they will have the data.
Also, remember, they already have thousands of staff… something like 70,000…
The future is going to be very interesting…