Big Brother cash machine campaign costs nearly £100k

Remember those menacing HMRC eyes that Fraser found staring out at him from a cashpoint last month? Well, it turns out they’re a pretty expensive pair of eyes. A Freedom of Information request by the TPA’s Matt Sinclair returned this week, revealing that this cashpoint campaign on tax evasion cost just under £100,000. The response says:

‘The total media spend for the Evasion ATM advertising campaign specified in your request was £95,930.40, excluding VAT. This amount was approved by the Cabinet Office.

‘To set this figure in the correct context, the Government has made around £1 billion available to HMRC to tackle avoidance, evasion and fraud to bring in an extra £7 billion by 2014/15. The advertising in ATM machines is just one strand of this work.’

Yesterday the taxman published details of hairdressers and grocers who are ‘tax dodgers’, either defaulting on payments due to the Revenue, or who had made deliberate errors in their returns.