Finance Bill Sub-Committee
Oral evidence, 13 October 2025.
The Chair
Welcome to the second half of this discussion. We have a different panel to question this time. Why do you not introduce yourselves? That is the polite thing to do, I think. Please just say who you are; we will then go on to the questions.
Dan Neidle
I was a tax lawyer for many years. I now run a micro think tank, Tax Policy Associates, which investigates and writes about tax policy and tax avoidance.
Mike Lewis
I am the director of TaxWatch. We are a UK charity also looking into avoidance and policy issues.
Alice Jeffries
I am the head of tax policy at the CBI—the Confederation of British Industry—which represents businesses in all sectors and of all sizes.
Chris Sanger
I am a member-chair of the Tax Professionals Forum, which was founded by the Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury way back in 2010; a founder of the ICAEW’s tax policy committee; a former head of business tax policy at the Treasury; and, now, the global government tax leader at EY.
The Chair
We will start off with a general question, then colleagues will go around the table asking other questions. As part of your work, you have all investigated and highlighted these tax avoidance schemes that have been marketed. Why do you think these schemes continue to be marketed? What more could HMRC do under its existing powers, or without further legislation, to protect people from being caught up in these things? Do we know enough about the impact of the recent changes to the promoters’ rules to judge whether the present proposals are necessary?
Dan Neidle
When I was in practice, I would have said that tax avoidance schemes are dead and that nobody does them because they are all destined to fail. I think I am right in saying that not a single scheme has failed in the courts in about 20 years, but a lot of people are out there selling tax schemes. I know someone in the rather sordid little industry that runs them; he and other sources tell me that they cost the country several billion pounds a year. How do you reconcile those two things? The people selling the schemes are not proper advisors. They are mostly unregulated, with the help of some rather disreputable members of the Bar. They are not doing it because they think that the schemes work; they are doing it for money. They will walk away when it falls apart and the clients either will never be spotted by HMRC—in which case, they are quids in and the rest of us lose—or will be spotted, in which case the schemes go down in flames and the clients end up in severe financial trouble. That is the problem; it is as much a mis-selling problem as a tax problem.
Mike Lewis
We agree that the number of people engaged in this activity and the menagerie of schemes out there are probably a bit wider than is suggested by HMRC’s focus on the 20 to 30 individuals who are working on disguised remuneration schemes. However, we take issue with the idea that this marketplace continues because it is totally divorced from professional bodies or the regulated professions. We have a situation where two of the bodies from which you have just heard evidence have among their members—in good standing, as of today—individuals who have been penalised for not disclosing information that they are required to disclose under the dishonest tax advisors legislation. We still have tax schemers who are members in good standing of the ICAEW and the CIOT. The conveyor belt that those professional standards—especially the rules on professional conduct in relation to taxation—were supposed to put in place between schemers, in terms of not being able to stay in the respectable professions, is not working. That is something we need to talk about as well.
Alice Jeffries
As you can imagine, the members of the CBI are exactly the kinds of legitimate businesses and professional advisors for whom Dan has been working for a very long time. We are not in a position to investigate or highlight tax avoidance schemes but, in all areas, we would like to see HMRC focus more on upstream compliance; by that, I mean the activities that take effect to prevent non-compliance occurring in the first place. HMRC has a wide range of powers to do that, as do other bodies. The one I would point to in particular is the Advertising Standards Authority. If you were to apply advertising standards policy codes to most advice for tax avoidance schemes, are they legal, decent, honest and truthful? No. They are mis-selling products, as Dan said. They could be stopped by the Advertising Standards Authority applying things to the advertisers and the platforms they advertise on more aggressively than it currently does. We have in this country an absolute ban, which works quite well, on tobacco advertising. Why could you not have the same for tax avoidance schemes? It is something that we have talked to HMRC about in the past, and we think that we could do more about it. There are other areas, too; for example, financial promotions legislation would capture some of these schemes, where they involve investments of any particular kind, and you could use that to shut some of them down. HMRC should also look at updating its own guidance and keeping that up to date because a lot of advisors—as we heard in the previous session—rely on that guidance to make decisions and inform their clients. HMRC’s guidance is often too woolly, too specific, too generic or anything in between. It is helpful if it is updated in line with case law as well, which does not happen often.
Chris Sanger
I will not tarry you long on this one because it is not an area in which the firm I am a member of operates, but I endorse the fact that reputable firms will not be in this market, so it does look to be a form of mis-selling.
The Chair
Does anybody want to come back on that?
Dan Neidle
We looked at a firm that sold an outrageous scheme; it could not possibly work. It was an Estonian company, but everyone involved was in the UK. The Advertising Standards Authority refused to act, saying that it was outside its jurisdiction. It is a good idea, but the ASA would need to be a bit more aggressive.
Lord Leigh of Hurley
We are worried that the creation of a criminal offence is a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Can you assure us of something? Say a company wants to undertake a regular commercial transaction—via a company abroad or something like that—and it turns to its tax advisors and says, “Help me do this in the most tax-effective way”. If the advisor comes up with a proposal to route it with a mixture of debt and equity or whatever but, subsequently, the Revenue points out that it is not an effective scheme and that the company has not saved tax, is there a risk of the advisor being deemed to have committed a criminal activity?
Dan Neidle
Can I take a step back and answer that slightly indirectly? The idea of criminalising failure to disclose under DOTAS was mine. I regret it because I think that the Government have come out with a better proposal and that this measure probably should not proceed; that might be a slightly surprising argument, so I should elaborate. The reason why I suggested it is that we saw scheme after scheme, none of which was disclosed under DOTAS and all of which obviously should have been disclosed. Why were they not disclosed? Because, if you are selling a scheme to clients and you tell them that it has been disclosed to HMRC as a tax avoidance scheme, they would have to be completely stupid to go ahead and do it. The whole horrid little market works based on the lie that its schemes are not disclosable. So I thought that the way to kill that market was to criminalise the failure to disclose, but I have changed my mind. The reasons for that are twofold. First, prosecuting failure to disclose is very hard. We and the people with whom we work have spent a lot of time trying to come up with streamlined ways to make the offence work and to make defences work—ones that could realistically be explained to a lay jury and be prosecuted—but we have rather failed. On the other hand, if you make it too simple so that a jury will easily buy it, you risk criminalising a normal advisor who happens to get things wrong. We must never criminalise a normal advisor who just makes a mistake. At that point, I thought that we had reached an impasse, but there are two elements to the other promotor proposals that the Government have on the table; they solve the solution in different ways. One of them is a criminal offence for breaching a universal stop notice. The vast majority of schemes that should be disclosed but are not are in the remuneration space. You could probably create one or two universal stop notices that criminalise that entire market; you have then achieved the aim of criminalisation. The second part of the package is the ability of HMRC to apply serious DOTAS penalties—not just to the company, because that will be gone the next afternoon, but to the beneficial owners of the company. This would provide a powerful incentive for people not to play games with DOTAS and fail to disclose when they should. Those two things together are more practical. They are easy to prosecute, on the one hand—no prosecution is needed for the civil penalties—and are without the potentially adverse consequences of criminalising ordinary advice. So I am, slightly embarrassingly, rowing back on lots of things I have said in the past. This proposal may be the answer in theory but, actually, the other answers that the Government have provided are better.
The Chair
That is interesting. Is it possible to trace beneficial owners efficiently and quickly?
Dan Neidle
If you could not do so, you could not prosecute under the DOTAS offence, so that is a problem you would have to solve anyway. I understand that it is very hard. I will name one example: Douglas Barrowman. Everybody knows that he was behind vast numbers of remuneration schemes and made at least £100 million from them. Was he ever a director of any of those companies? No. Was he ever a shareholder? No. Could you trace his ownership? I suspect that, if you put the directors in a room with some detectives and talked to them for long enough, they would eventually give up who the true comptroller was, but, if they did not do so, you could not prosecute anyway.
The Chair
Shall we go on?
Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted
Yes. We seem to have covered quite a lot of—
Lord Leigh of Hurley
Unless any of the others wanted to answer on that.
Chris Sanger
I want to comment on DOTAS; we heard this from the previous panel as well. It is worth reflecting on when DOTAS was created and what a success it has become. It was intended to create a massive funnel to take in a whole series of things that would allow HMRC to get everything and to sift out the tax avoidance cases. That was a good idea at the time; it allowed HMRC to focus on a few things. It also created a market where people did not want to have anything in DOTAS, so it has been very effective. The danger of doing any of these things is that, if you criminalise non-disclosure, you end up flipping the switch the other way around, where everyone wants to. I used to call DOTAS DOUBTASTAS, which stood for disclosure of usually benign transactions and some tax avoidance schemes. It was that big funnel. If we end up going down a criminalisation route, it will become a massive thing again and we will lose all of that benefit. So I do think that there is a real downside to going down this provision route.
Alice Jeffries
To give a bit of colour to that criminalisation piece, let me put this into another context. If the police said to you, “We’ve got a new definition of ‘burglary’—entering a house and intending to use what is inside—but we will have some guidance that says that, if you used your own key and it’s your fridge contents, that’s fine, so, don’t worry, we won’t prosecute you”, I do not think that anyone would be happy with that. That is basically what this is, because DOTAS is so wide and covers so many genuinely commercial transactions that, ever since the rules were implemented, there has been a combination of guidance with incredibly long lists of things that were thought to be so far out of scope that they were not even put in the statutory instruments—although it is accepted that you could read them as being in, so they were put in the guidance—and stuff that is in the statutory instruments but is excluded specifically. Those include things such as self-employed pension provision and ISAs; they have to be in statute saying that they are not tax avoidance schemes for the purposes of DOTAS. That is how wide it is. We are very concerned about having a criminal offence based on that and about the impact of that on the tax advice market.
Chris Sanger
It is not just about the provisions coming from us. I quote HMRC’s own website: “There will be some arrangements and proposals where it is difficult to be definitive about whether they are notifiable”. This is on the HMRC GOV.UK website. It is clear that this is something to which it is really difficult to apply a yes or no answer.
Alice Jeffries
I know that Mike wants to come in but I want to make one final point on that. It will create a haystack of disclosures—this is what we are slightly worried about—in which HMRC will not be able to find the needle.
Mike Lewis
We have to be really clear between criminalising non-disclosure versus criminalising a piece of advice or a structural transaction that falls within DOTAS. Nobody is suggesting that, simply because you give a piece of advice or create a structural transaction that falls within a DOTAS hallmark, that should in itself be criminalised. There are, of course, lots of other bits of law where non-notification carries a criminal penalty. There are bits of money laundering law, for example, where MLOs—money laundering officers—can, in theory, be prosecuted if they do not disclose certain information. The over-compliance argument absolutely applies in that instance, in certain parts of money laundering regimes, but that is not an argument against the principle of having a criminal offence for non-notification; it is an argument for making sure that what needs to be notified against criminal liability is narrowly defined.
Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted
We are well on the way to having answered our third question, which is about whether the trigger for the criminal offence—failure to disclosure under DOTAS—is proportionate to the Government’s policy aim. I think that the answer is largely “no”, so far, with that wonderful example from Alice of taking or using things from a house and in terms of what changes are needed to ensure that it is appropriately targeted. Dan has already suggested some changes to his original ideas. I am trying to get a grasp on how wide this is. For example, the Government have been very public about how they like the new PISCES system on the London Stock Exchange, where you can trade private shares on an exchange—it is an auction system—and they do not have stamp duty. If you advised somebody to trade under the PISCES system, rather than having a private secondary trade, would that be caught?
Dan Neidle
Definitely not. First, is the main benefit of your trade a tax benefit? No. Unless something very odd is going on, stamp duty is just too small to be a main benefit. Do any of the hallmarks apply? I do not think so. You could mass-market it using standardised documentation, but I do not think you would do that. I am not even sure whether it is a scheme or a set of arrangements in these rules; it is simply a choice of trading venue.
Alice Jeffries
Although I am a chartered tax advisor, I do not have anywhere near Dan’s level of experience. I am not saying that I think he is wrong, but I am saying that there is question there. If you were a small company that was going on to a private exchange, with the intention of marketing to a small group of retail investors for the first time, would that count as mass marketing if you provided them all with a leaflet explaining that you intend to sell your shares via PISCES and that they will not have to pay stamp duty, whereas they would have had to do so had you listed on another market? I genuinely do not know. It is quite possible that the answer is no, but the point is that these are the questions that advisors will now have to answer at a level of detail they may not have done before. Certainly, when tax policy changes—as I say, the HMRC guidance often does not keep up—you may find that you have something that is totally legitimate and intended as a policy aim but is not excluded in guidance yet. So you are unclear on whether you have to disclose, and you do.
Baroness Fairhead
I have one question to follow up on that. I was struck by Dan’s recognition of having promoted it and looking at ways to target it more directly, which is the challenge that we have talked about before. If targeting is not possible, are there safeguards that can be put in place, given that this is strict liability and that the idea is not to stop normal tax planning? Can there be any more safeguards, or is it best to leave it to other solutions under either tax fraud or a different approach?
Dan Neidle
We thought that we had found a solution. Our solution was to have a firm-wide defence. The point was that there are firms that this is really about. Those firms are not PwC; they are small groups of promoters. So we have a bona fide business test. You would say that you have a defence: unless at least 50% of the business undertaken by your company was DOTAS-disclosable, you would be out of the rules because you would have a bona fide business. We thought that a defence like that would mean that the vast majority of businesses—in fact, all legitimate advisors—would never have to think about these rules at all because they would know that, no matter what the characteristics of an individual transaction were, their firm would benefit from the firm-wide defence. We thought that that was a complete answer. However, that does not solve the fundamental problem: all of the complexity and uncertainty you have been hearing about is a problem for prosecutions. If one wanted to proceed with this, despite the difficulty with prosecutions, one would need some kind of firm-wide defence that does not require detailed consideration or lawyering of individual transactions. However, I am not sure that I would now proceed with it; I feel somewhat guilty about having run the horses up this particular hill but now saying that we should not be there, but that is my position.
Chris Sanger
We heard in the previous session about the reasonable procedures in the corporate criminal defence. One of those, you could say, is that, if you had the reasonable procedures defence, you would be able to rely in advance on the fact that you would not be subject to criminalisation. That has a couple of challenges. First, you can rely on it only when you go to court, which is too late; you need to know it at the time and HMRC needs to know it. So you need to build on that slightly by having a set of agreed-upon reasonable procedures, pre-reviewed by HMRC. If you could do this, those firms that were going to be in the environment where they were having to make DOTAS decisions could show those procedures to HMRC and make sure that they have been validated. You would also get Dan’s firm test at the same time, in effect. The fundamental challenge we have here—this is why we are talking about it right at the beginning—is that we cannot identify the 20 to 30 people because they are chameleons. They change their shape. I cannot imagine—maybe I am wrong—that they would voluntarily put themselves in front of HMRC and say, “Here are our procedures. Come and have a look at my business. Do you accept that I am not one of the evil people, which I really am?”. It just does not seem to ring true. You could see something along those lines, which might give certainty, but that would then impose a big burden on HMRC to provide that pre-approval, because every firm having to make a decision—we have heard how uncertain it is—would need and want that pre-approval. However, if you really want to go down that route, that is perhaps one way of doing so. There may also be a prospect of building Dan’s firm test into it.
Mike Lewis
We have also suggested some kind of threshold test, perhaps in the legislation itself, which would get at the nature of the activity that Dan’s original idea was supposed to tackle—that is, firms that are persistently and flagrantly not reporting schemes that are clearly within DOTAS hallmarks, publicly available and notified to various people. This includes persistent non-notification, so I mean some kind of persistence and marginality test in the legislation.
The Chair
What do you mean by a marginality test?
Mike Lewis
In practice, I am probably talking about something that falls squarely within the DOTAS definitions that identify mass-marketed schemes—these include the scale and nature of the marketing, as well as the nature of the legal advice falling under the legal advice hallmark—or something like that. It would mean that you were really capturing persistent and obvious non-notification. Obviously, you are setting up a bunch of bright-line tests that will have to be solved in legislative drafting, but where we started was with Dan identifying a problem. There is a set of firms about which we all know—and some about which we do not—that, obviously, should disclose activity but clearly and persistently do not. Something that really targets that would be helpful.
The Chair
Did you say that there have been no successful prosecutions in this area?
Dan Neidle
I do not believe that a single promoter has ever been prosecuted for taking a ridiculous tax position. For example, let us say that I go out there and market a scheme where you can escape income tax by throwing a bunch of money in a circle, painting your front door red or something else ridiculous. I then go to a KC. That KC—to call them “bent” is slightly, but not very, unfair—produces an opinion confirming that painting your door red gets you out of income tax. I get a bunch of clients, they do the scheme, HMRC challenges it and they all lose. The schemes that we see are not much more credible than the painting-your-door-red scheme. HMRC never prosecutes the promoters. The reason why it does not is because the promoters can say, “We thought that the scheme worked. We were being honest. We had an opinion from a KC”. There have been, as far as I am aware, no prosecutions of promoters for bent schemes.
Mike Lewis
There have previously been prosecutions, under the cheating the Revenue offence, of promoters of sideways lottery schemes, for example.
Dan Neidle
Because they lied and made stuff up. Some of the ridiculous film schemes, which involved people throwing lots of money in a circle and claiming 10 times the relief from the money they put in, were not prosecuted. People who went further and invented expenses were prosecuted. That is the kind of thing HMRC prosecutes; it does not prosecute ridiculous technical positions, no matter how ridiculous they are.
Mike Lewis
The question is: in some of these schemes, are similar falsehoods being given to HMRC or placed in tax returns?
Dan Neidle
Probably.
Mike Lewis
That is a legitimate question. The facts that sideways lottery schemes were basically killed off and that disguised remuneration schemes are flourishing to some degree—though not entirely—are also down to HMRC’s prosecution strategy.
Alice Jeffries
I come back to a point made in the previous session. There have been First-tier Tribunal cases against promoters where larges fines have been issued in some cases for failure to disclose. A class of those—for example, IPS Progression Ltd, Adapt Ltd and Countrywide Partners Ltd—were based on the Isle of Man. They had their First-tier Tribunal cases only last year. I cannot tell you whether they are appealing to the Upper Tribunal—I would assume that they are—and there will be appeals ongoing but, even if they come to the point where it is finally decided that they definitely owe money to the Revenue, it is unclear how that money will be obtained. If we were to criminalise it, what would be the chances of extradition of any of the people behind those schemes from the Isle of Man? They would probably be very low indeed. There is a problem with all of these as solutions where most of your promoters are not based in the UK.
Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted
I want to explore that a little further. Is there any way in which one could get at the mis-selling point that you mentioned in connection with advertising standards? Could HMRC be given the right to act in a space that is already occupied by another regulator?
Alice Jeffries
Tax authorities have worked with the ASA before, as Dan said. They could do it again. There is a lot of compliance money in the budget for HMRC now; some of that could be put towards working with the ASA in order to boost its powers in identifying and taking down inaccurate tax advice. A situation where the promoter of that tax advice is not based in the UK should still be captured under the ASA code, as long as it is paid-for marketing that is advertised to UK consumers. It should be possible to use the existing code. If the ASA does not feel able to do that, there must be reasons behind that. Whether it is because it feels that its powers are not strong enough or because it does not feel that it has the capacity and funds to do it, I do not know—I do not know enough about it—but there is definitely a route there that could be used more effectively.
Dan Neidle
The reason is that a lot of promoters do not do paid-for marketing these days. They use YouTube, TikTok and direct mail shots; those things are within scope of the ASA’s rule only if the company is in the UK. There has been a trend over the past five years of promoters establishing themselves outside the UK because that makes it harder for HMRC to investigate them. The people are almost always here but the companies are in the Isle of Man, Estonia or Vanuatu—wherever.
The Chair
Does anybody else want to come in?
Lord Pitkeathley of Camden Town
Has enough time been allowed for something that we have not particularly covered?
The Chair
Yes—ask about the timing.
Lord Pitkeathley of Camden Town
Do you think that enough time has been allowed for the proposals that have been made?
Chris Sanger
I do not. There is an opportunity here. We should be clear that the Revenue is actively engaging and being very positive in engaging and understanding the points that we are making, whether that is through the institutes you heard from on the previous panel or individual tax advisors. HMRC is taking on the points that are happening. However, there is a lot of challenge here. I have genuine sympathy for HMRC because it is trying to tackle those 20 to 30 people—the amorphous blob that changes shape. There is more to be done either in identifying the 20 to 30 people and their characteristics or in identifying the characteristics that they cannot have of the rest—the 85,000 you heard be referred to before. If we can get that bit right, everything else flows properly. Otherwise, we are looking at trying to look at things that they are doing themselves. You have a choice of those two options: either the party or the actions. There is more that can be done. The example that I gave before about the pre-approved procedures is an example of this because we know that the 20 to 30 people would not want to open up their books to HMRC—or, indeed, to any other party that is there. There are ideas out there that need more time to be delivered. The challenge is that, if you do not give it more time, you are going to get the outcomes you heard about in the previous panel in terms of advisors looking at this and saying, “There is a statutory, criminal offence here. Does that mean I should be acting in this market? Do I want to?” I commented in the previous consultation—HMRC and the Treasury were kind enough to repeat it in the response to the consultation—that this is like walking along the side of a road. At the moment, if you make a mistake in DOTAS, you have a slight slip and you end up on the kerbside, going on to the road. What this does is change you from walking along the side of the pavement to walking along the side of a cliff. If I am walking along the side of a cliff, I am not going to do that unless the benefit of doing so is much higher. It is about understanding that and understanding what that does both to the industry and to what else is happening. The downsides that that will create need more time. We are getting good engagement but, in the few weeks we have until the Budget—
The Chair
Are those fears of a much wider impact legitimate?
Chris Sanger
Absolutely.
The Chair
In your view?
Chris Sanger
Yes. In my view—the others can comment in a moment—if you have that criminal offence hanging over you, you will want to work out whether you actually want to be advising in that market. It is not just about the firms. If you believe that legal professional privilege means that this does not apply to you, anyone wanting to advise in that will not want to be in an accountancy firm; they will want to be in a law firm. Even if you did not know whether it is going to work, you would move to that law firm because it would give you another defence. As an advisor, you will sleep better at night knowing that you are in a law firm than you would do were you in an accounting firm. It distorts the market. Whether or not it is true is almost irrelevant; you will have that distortion on it. There is more that needs to be done to think these things through.
The Chair
What do Mike and Dan think of that?
Alice Jeffries
The CBI has professional services in its membership, but we are a wider business organisation. I am here because we think that there is a wider business impact. A number of different impacts were discussed in the previous session: whether this would lead to advisors ceasing to provide advice or increasing the cost of that advice; whether this would lead to people stepping away from doing genuinely commercial transactions; or whether this would lead them to cease to think that the DOTAS regime works at all and to think that it would undermine their power. Our view is that all of those things would happen in some form of succession. Some firms would feel unable to give advice; that is a particular problem when you combine it with the tax-geared penalties part of some of the other measures that are in the Finance Bill, which would mean that, if they got this wrong, they would potentially have to pay a proportion of the lost revenue to HMRC. That is a huge worry for advisory firms. Some firms will cease to give advice. Some firms will report a lot more, which will waste a lot of HMRC’s time, a lot of advisory time and a lot of business money, in paying the fees for all of that to happen. Some firms will step away from genuinely commercial transactions because they hear that they have a DOTAS flag—as long as we are still in a world where everyone views DOTAS as a terrible red flag that they do not want to deal with. Slowly, over time, that will ease into a world where DOTAS is just something you have to do if you want to use a quoted Eurobond or a particular type of financing, which will undermine the value of the whole regime. Over time, we will get to a point where everyone says, “Yes, the DOTAS filings are being done on this particular M&A transaction”. It will be extra time and money wasted with the uncertainty while we get to that point. All of that is, we think, bad for access to good-quality tax advice and the speed and quality of the UK’s M&A market.
Mike Lewis
We clearly cannot speak for the professions; I certainly cannot speak for them. We are aware that, every time a new penalty, power or disclosure obligation is introduced in law, we are told that it will lead to market distortion and to professionals stepping away from the market. In 2012, when the dishonest tax agents regime came in, we were told by the professional bodies that it was analogous to anti-terrorism legislation. They said that it was analogous to penalising somebody for standing in Westminster Abbey; I think that was the phrase that was used. Clearly, that has not happened. We need to take those kinds of warnings with a pinch of salt. The fears around over-reporting are much more legitimate. Considering the time that we have had to consider this measure, the bigger question that we have is: have we had time to see whether existing criminal offences can be used to tackle this in a hardcore way? We are not opposed to a well-targeted new criminal offence, but there are a lot of other criminal offences on the statute book that are not used.
Dan Neidle
I have two points to make. First, Mike is right that HMRC has gained a lot of powers against promoters and advisors in the past 20 years. Most of those have been met by complaints that they would cause terrible problems. In fact, the problem has been HMRC underusing those powers. I am not aware of a single legitimate advisor who has been the subject of any of those powers. That is my first point. My second point is that there has been enough time because we now know that, realistically, there are two ways this can go. One is to do something that I think is sensible: park the proposal to criminalise DOTAS and focus instead on the civil penalties for DOTAS and the criminal offences around universal stop notices. If that is insufficient, we can return to it, but I would park this otherwise. If that is not the decision, instead, I would open a consultation on a firm-wide defence. Firm-wide defences enable you to bridge the gap and have a DOTAS offence that applies to the bad guys but requires no consideration at all by legitimate advisors. I would say that that is less preferable because there would still be a serious practical problem with prosecutions. Anyone who doubts that should look at, say, the judgment in Hyrax—a case of a ridiculously poor remuneration scheme with a 56-page judgment concluding that DOTAS applied. To me, it is obvious that DOTAS applied, but Robert Venables KC—the man who devised the scheme and, presumably, advised that DOTAS did not apply—nevertheless led the tribunal around rings of linguistic arguments. It rejected those, but read that judgment and imagine a jury faced with those arguments. That is why I think that, ultimately, a criminal offence is unprosecutable.
The Chair
Does anybody have any further questions? We are clear on what the views are, but are there any further questions? No. Thank you very much for coming along; we very much appreciate it. We will take into account everything that you have said. That concludes this session.