The taxman gets tough

Having near-exhausted the extra yield from big firms, the taxman is going after individuals, says Merryn Somerset Web. Here's what you can do about it.

Are you paying allthe tax you legally should? Check because if you don't, someone else will. Earlier this year we heard about HMRC's Connect supercomputer, which draws on a vast range of corporate and state sources (social media, credit-card transactions, land registry transaction data) to figure out how much you should be paying and compare it with how much you actually do.

Meanwhile, staffing in the tax office's Affluent Unit which investigates the tax affairs of UK residents with an annual income of over £150,000, or a net worth of £1m has risen by 20% over the last year. It is doing a good job (relative to its remit at least): the take from what accountants call "middle England's taxpayers" rose by £438m last year.

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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.