Tackling Vat Fraud,Hm Customs and Excise

Download or read book Tackling Vat Fraud,Hm Customs and Excise written by Great Britain. National Audit Office and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Value Added Tax (VAT) is a self assessed tax on the supply of goods and services, collected by 1.7 million registered traders and paid over to Customs.Traders may not pay the correct amount of VAT for a number of reasons including error, deliberately understating their VAT liabilities or through systematic attacks on the VAT system, with an estimated £11.9 billion lost in VAT in 2002-03, including substantial nonfraud losses. The Government has set Customs a target to stop the long-term growth in the size of the overall VAT gap, and to cut it from 15.7 per cent in 2002-03 to 12 per cent of the total amount that could be theoretically collected from VAT by 2005-06. This NAO report examines Customs' approach to detecting, investigating and preventing VAT fraud; tackling the most serious type of VAT fraud known as VAT missing trader intra-Community fraud; and tracking those traders operating in the shadow economy who fail to register to pay VAT.