YOU HAVE YOUR SAY
EVERY week, Money Mail receives hundreds of your letters and emails about our stories. Here are some of the best from our recent story about how tax officials are spying on your eBay and Airbnb accounts to find out how much you’re earning...
AS PER usual, the taxman is going after the little man trying to get by in an era of wage freezes and rising food prices. It seems the rich are allowed to get richer while the taxman chases the rest of us for pennies.
A. L., Preston, Lancs.
PEOPLE complain, but we’ve all called for a clampdown on tax cheats. If we constantly call for everyone to pay their fair share, we can’t complain if it happens.
K. L., Margate, Kent.
THE taxman is not interested in people who sell some secondhand clothes or a bit of jewellery here or there — they are after the people selling 100 bags, 200 coats, 50 jumpers and 30 mobile phones. If you’re selling enough that it becomes a business, that is when HMRC will start being interested.
H. J., London.
I’M SURE that HMRC could get this information anyway if it wanted to. All HMRC is doing when it releases these stories is trying to scare people into paying voluntarily. No doubt, some highprofile cases hit the headlines, but the truth of the matter is the taxman doesn’t have the resources to pursue this on a significant scale.
J. R., Keighley, W. Yorks.
IT’S fair enough that the taxman has the proper legal rights to chase people who don’t pay their tax. But it doesn’t appear to apply to multi-national companies that seek to artificially reduce corporation tax bills using overseas companies. We need to change the law so this stops happening.
A. S., Hull.
MY MAIN worry is that HMRC staff will have access to our personal details, bank accounts, passwords and more. How often do we read about briefcases full of customer records being left on trains and in taxis? I hope there are systems in place at HMRC to protect our identities when staff are handling all this information.
F. U., Essex.
I WAS an inspector for Customs and Excise when VAT was first introduced. I used to scan the small ads in the local paper for used car sellers. If the same phone number appeared regularly, it led us to conclude this was a trade seller, so we would call round to see who he was and if he was registered for VAT. This new operation by HMRC appears to be an up-to-date version of that.
K. N., E. Sussex.
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