Who's next on HMRC's hit list?

The media recently seems to have been full of stories about tax avoidance – but do they really mean avoidance or do they mean evasion? It seems to me that the line is getting increasingly blurred. Dennis Healey, former chancellor of the exchequer, once famously said: “The difference between tax evasion and tax avoidance is the thickness of a prison wall.” In other words, tax evasion is illegal whereas tax avoidance is perfectly acceptable – a view given judicial credibility in the House of Lords case of IRC v Duke of Westminster (1936) in which Lord Tomlin stated: “Every man is entitl...