Lord Lea of Crondall
Main Page: Lord Lea of Crondall (Non-affiliated - Life peer)
Lord Ashton of Hyde
My Lords, on whether online platforms should be made liable for VAT and duty, HMRC is looking at all possible solutions now and cannot rule anything in or anything out.
Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)
My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that some years ago—10 years ago, I think—one of the sub-committees of the European Union Committee looked at e-commerce, and we were astonished to find that there were almost no data within Europe? I know the issue goes wider than Europe, but that is one area where transfer pricing is a big issue. One cannot be surprised, therefore, that multinationals run rings around HMRC. Will the noble Lord look into this question of data collection so that the Inland Revenue data match the Board of Trade data on how much e-commerce there is, which is not the case now, rather than it being treated as insignificant in numerical terms?
Lord Ashton of Hyde
The noble Lord is absolutely right to identify data as one of the crucial enforcement tools. The task force has been set up, first, to enable cross-government co-operation with other government agencies and, secondly, to look at issues such as data.