Make amends with the taxman

Online traders who owe money to the taxman can clean their slates now and avoid prosecution later, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

If you've been paying less tax than perhaps you should have you might want to give HMRC a call and see if you can't make amends. That's partly because it is the right thing to do. But it's also because the organisation is under pressure from the government to clamp down on tax avoidance.

Those who doubt that they are responding to this pressure with enthusiasm need only look to the number of tax disputes waiting to be heard by the tax tribunal system. Ministry of Justice figures show that these rose by more than a third last year: there was a back log of 22,100 cases by the last quarter of 2011.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.