S.T.U cgull
Well-known member
Allow me to introduce the HMRC Data Capture Data Match system.
All the countries who have a reciprocal tax treaty (the list is quite extensive) share information. Yes there are a couple of tax havens still out there but generally speaking, most countries are now very financially joined-up.
I'm not permitted to explain any detail of DCDM, but as a summary, it generates a global financial portfolio footprint of every UK tax domicile, the IT side of this system has been in place many years. The problem is, there is no way HMRC could resource investigation of every individual who may have underpaid (accidently or intentionally) some of their tax liability.
What it does do is calculate a "potential yield" of tax to decide a risk-score and only the cases that generate the highest risk score will/may be investigated.
"Throughout their lives" is interesting. HMRC use the seven-year rule for income/tax investigation. But retention for ALL pension data is the life of the pensioner + 10 years. I don't know about all assets but all names on property deeds are fed into DCDM. So if you gift (or sell for a £1) the new property owner will be known to DCDM.
It's quite a big-brother, the only area it struggled with is money-laundering where zero assets or financial records leave no trail - but there are other systems that exist to (try to) address this - nuff said.
How does that supercomputer capture & recognise non-UK, non-financial assets?