Lord Flight
Main Page: Lord Flight (Conservative - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Flight's debates with the HM Treasury
(10 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Newby
My Lords, this is exactly the issue which the OECD is looking at currently. Along with the French and the Germans, we have made a significant financial contribution in terms of getting experts working on this. There are a number of ways of dealing with it. The noble Lord suggests one way. The key thing is that we rapidly come up with new rules and get them implemented at an international level.
Lord Flight
Pertinent to the last question, some 20 years ago when transfer payments were introduced, I acted for the company that I was running in discussing with the Inland Revenue, as it was at the time, how they would operate. The arrangements were not based on legal matters, but on commercial reality. We went through each area of activity to see what was going on where and what would be a fair allocation of costs, revenues and profits. I cannot understand why transfer payments are not operated thus today. Will the Minister say whether we are operating transfer payment regimes in the way that they were intended and started 20 years ago?
Lord Newby
There is considerable scope for HMRC to undertake the kind of discussions that the noble Lord describes. The additional resources that we put into compliance have been spent in no small measure dealing with exactly that. The amount of revenue that we have been able to recover has increased by a number of billions, but this does not deal with problems such as the ones that my noble friend Lord Teverson has described.