Ritchie and overinflated tax gap estimates
Posted by Christie Malry on September 21, 2011 at 7:51 pm
Ritchie is still peddling his tired old estimate of the tax gap:
All you need to know about HMRC have got their tax gap calculations wrong is explained here.
And all you need to know about how Ritchie has got his tax gap calculations wrong is explained here.
Why he's continuing to trot out these numbers when they're so clearly wrong, have been proven to be wrong, and the errors in his calculations have been spelled out to him in crystal clear detail is anyone's guess. I hope the PCS didn't pay him very much this month.



Ritchie acknowledges late tax shouldn't be included http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201012...
Yet his report (p16, point 5) clearly says that the gap is 120bn "a year". He only gets to 120bn by including late paid tax.
[...] as we know, so much of Ritchie's public pronouncements on tax consist of his peddling his wild overestimates of the extent of tax avoidance. But it's intriguing that there's someone from ICAEW on the [...]
[...] least one NGO, in this case Church Action on Poverty, might finally be turning their backs on the idiotic estimates produced by one Mr R Murphy, Esq., and using the much more reliable HMRC [...]