Recent announcements from the new coalition government have emerged that expenditure of £900m is due to be spent over the next 4 years to tackle tax avoidance and evasion in the hope of raising an extra £7bn each year by 2014/15.
How this money will be spent is still unclear, but part of it is going to be allocated towards the establishment of dedicated teams investigating offshore tax schemes and organised crime.
This is all happening at a time when HMRC are being forced to find up to 25% in efficiencies from its budgets as part of the recent comprehensive spending review so it will be interesting to see how this £900m is going to be spent.
Hopefully, some of this will go into an improvement in the systems that are fundamentally at fault for many of the tax problems that have come to light.