How carousel fraud is putting the VAT system in a spin

The spiralling costs of a sophisticated cross-border scam are punching a £10bn-a-year hole in the Treasury’s finances.

It's a sophisticated kind of cross-border VAT fraud, which involves both tax evasion and the straightforward theft of money from HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC). In its simplest form, a fraudster obtains a VAT registration to acquire goods tax-free from a trader in another country within the European Union. Typically, these goods are small, high-value, easily transportable items, such as computer chips or mobile phones. The goods are then sold on at a higher, VAT-inclusive price, but the seller disappears without paying the tax to HMRC. Officially, this type of crime is known as "missing trader intra-community" (MTIC) fraud.

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.