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£20 million in tax chased from Jersey HSBC accounts

An estimated 170 HSBC customers with accounts in Jersey are being chased for up to £20 million in tax by UK authorities.

A HM Revenue & Customs investigation, prompted by a whistle-blower, had uncovered alleged tax avoidance - and possible evasion.

The chair of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, Margaret Hodge, said at a hearing on Wednesday that such practices could be ‘endemic’ within HSBC.

HMRC confirms it received a dataset relating to Jersey account holders. As is our normal practice, we set up a project team to handle this offshore data.

Our risk assessment is that this data may help us recover £10-20m tax. The data was incomplete and old. This meant that there was insufficient information to develop potential criminal investigations. We believe the data to be around 10 years old. It also included those who had already disclosed their offshore accounts through earlier campaigns.

We have given customers the opportunity to voluntarily disclose through the Crown Dependency Disclosure Facility (commenced April 2013).

Every Jersey financial institution was obliged to write directly to each of their customers to tell them about this disclosure facility. We are challenging about 170 who we believe pose the highest risk.

– HMRC spokesperson