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More staff at HMRC are chasing benefit cheats than pursuing wealthy tax avoiders who cost the Treasury up to 50 times as much, it has been revealed.

According to the Revenue, the total value of benefit overpaid as a result of fraud last year was £2.3billion – 1.2 per cent of total spending.

Estimates of the “tax gap” of revenue lost due to tax avoidance by wealthy individuals and corporations varies from £35billion to £120billion a year.

SNP MP Chris Stephens slammed Boris Johnson’s Government after uncovering figures showing the Revenue’s much-lauded Wealthy team has lost the equivalent of more than 80 staff over the last financial year.

The Glasgow South West MP discovered that the Government has 500 more inspectors chasing benefit claimants for tiny amounts of individual fraud and overpayment in the social security system.

Statistics uncovered by Stephens show that in December the HMRC’s Wealthy team had about 961 full-time equivalent staff engaged in customer compliance, down from approximately 1046 the previous year.

But in the same month, December 2019, the HMRC had the equivalent of 1400 full-time staff working as fraud investigators to try to recover overpaid funds from benefit cheats.

Stephens, who asked a series of parliamentary questions in pursuit of the tax picture, said: “These alarming figures demonstrate that the Tory Government appear to be either complacent or just not interested in tackling the tax gap or in chasing the rich and corporations who avoid paying what they owe the state.

“The Government must now explain why there has been a reduction in staff.

“Either they are unable to hire staff, which suggests that a major recruitment strategy should be put in place, or they are wilfully reducing numbers to protect avoiders and evaders.

“Either way, these numbers are shocking. The Government must now introduce a strategy to hire more staff to combat tax avoidance and evasion.”

Since 2010, the Government has invested more than £2billion in HMRC to tackle evasion, avoidance and non-compliance and announced new measures to tackle non-compliance.

Figures show that the HMRC’s Offshore, Corporate and Wealthy compliance division recovered £560million in 2018-19 and delivered an eight-fold increase in the number of individuals and corporates under criminal investigation to more than 400.

HMRC said: “The Wealthy team work with around 24,500 full-time equivalent staff in HMRC’s Customer Compliance Group, including in counter-avoidance and the fraud investigation service so that HMRC can effectively tackle avoidance and evasion within this customer segment.

“They also focus on promoting tax compliance and helping customers through digital services.”