UK Pursues Tax Evaders Using Stolen Bank Details

Andrew Smith writes "The UK taxman (HM Revenue & Customs) is reportedly using a stolen list of bank details to pursue wealthy individuals with off-shore accounts. The list was stolen by an employee of HSBC, and gave details of the bank's customers with money in Swiss accounts. The bank employee fled to France, and the authorities there passed the details on to the UK tax collection agency."

Comments

Re:Remember kids, UK stole nothing

[ub3r n3u7r4l1st]

criminal evidence is not considered legitimate property and can be seized by the government at any time.

Re:Two Wrongs. . .

[arivanov]

In the UK income tax, social security, etc are all taken at source (so is most of EU). In order for money to enter a tax evasion channel it has to come from outside normal payroll. If it is outside normal payroll (let's say investment) there is plenty of ways to tax-avoid which is not a crime. You can register a company which "owns" all of your income sources which are outside payroll (shares, etc) and tax deduce to the point where you pay very little or nothing.

In order for money to be tax evaded in the EU (not tax avoided) it has to be both outside payroll and too "dirty" to allow one to put it into a company or another accounting vehicle. That does not sound like "hard earned" money to me. In fact tracing the source of the money may prove a very interesting exsercise. That happened in the German case. Quite a few VP and board level people found on the Lichtenstein list ended up with fraud and corruption proceedings against them.

Re:Two Wrongs. . .

[houghi]

Does a country have a right to use information illegally obtained by a third party to enforce laws against those implicated by that tainted information?

I would say yes. It happened in Belgium a few years back as well with banks in Luxembourg. The article also talks about the case in Germany where authorities bought the list.

Also these will not be directly used for a court case, but for tax investigations. There will be a lwhole lot of different rules that apply there.

In Belgium when it was known that the list was available, people had the chance to 'come clear' and confess without any serious trouble (except they had to pay their taxes).

As it has happend at least twice (Germany and Belgium) I also do not see what the news worthyness is. Oh, right. This is /.