By Press TV
Britain’s tax authority is failing to prosecute big businesses that avoid paying tax, MPs have warned.

In a report on tax collection performance, the UK’s House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) accused HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) of being too lenient on multinational corporations while pursuing small companies.
Britain’s public finances watchdog also said in its report, published on Thursday, that HMRC is not “on the side” of individuals and small firms who pay their fair share of money to the government.
“HMRC holds back from using the full range of sanctions at its disposal. It pursues tax owed by the smaller businesses but seems to lose its nerve when it comes to mounting prosecutions against multinational corporations,” said British Labour MP Margaret Hodge, who chairs the committee.
She criticized the organization for overestimating the amount of money it is expected to collect from UK holders of Swiss bank accounts. HMRC has extracted just £440 million so far from Swiss bank accounts in the current tax year, rather than the £3.12 billion forecast.
Hodge also blasted HMRC for allowing the tax gap to grow. This came after the organization calculated that the difference between the taxes it was supposed to receive and those it managed to collect in 2011-12 was £35 billion.
Lawmakers recently warned that unpaid taxes, fraud and error are costing Britain billions of pounds a year. They said the annual losses amount to £55 billion, including the total tax gap and the cost of fraud to the public sector in the UK.
It is estimated that the corporate tax evasion is costing the UK economy something between £45 to £90 billion a year, meaning that it is practically undoing all austerity measures as well as widening the gap between the rich and the poor in the British society.