Taxation Fraud Targets

News reaches your humble author of an incentivisation scheme within the civil service:

The Times has learnt that £44,000 in bonuses for the “most senior staff” at the Revenue & Customs Prosecution Office (RCPO), which pursues tax fraud cases, were linked in part to hitting confiscation targets.

Sounds good on face value. Yeah, the public sector should incentivise its workers to get the best from them. Although here, the results are good only for the ever greedy public purse. The penalties are, shall we say, a little draconian:

In one recent case, 16 people convicted in a £3.2 million VAT fraud conspiracy were each ordered to pay back £3.2 million — a total of £51 million.

In another case a pharmacist who had overclaimed £464 in VAT was subjected to a confiscation order of more than £212,000.

Right. Now, I'm all for those committing crimes being punished, but a fraud of just under £500 carrying a penalty of just under a quarter of a million pounds seems a little excessive. Particularly since those pursuing the conviction are incentivised to get as much money as possible from the guilty party.

Still, this is Britain, so at least people will get a fair trial, so perhaps we can rest a little easier with the incredibly harsh penalties:

In other cases, where defendants’ assets have been frozen before trial, there have been complaints that they have been hampered in mounting their defence; for example, they have been unable to hire expert witnesses.

Magic. So the government incentivises people to get as much money as possible from those accused of fraud, and then it turns out that certain things happen that reduce the likelihood of the accused people getting a fair trial. I don't know about anyone else, but this absolutely screams at me as something that is horrifically wrong.

Sir Ivan Lawrence, QC, said he was uneasy about “manifest injustices” in confiscation proceedings that were compounded by the setting of targets. Sir Ivan, a former Conservative MP and chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, said: “Once you start setting targets you are saying, ‘Never mind justice.’ Bodies like RCPO have to make a judgment on the cases they pursue — if they make that judgment on the basis that they will receive a lot of money, it calls into question whether justice is going to be done.

“There are indications that the Court of Appeal is uneasy about some of these cases, but the astonishing thing is that no one is up in arms about it.”

Well, quite. We should all be up in arms about this. It has nothing to do with justice; it is governments trying to get as much as they possibly can from their people. It represents an absence of justice, and the draconian power of an ever more arrogant state.