"My name is Greg Wise." "I'm an actor." "You may have seen me playing morally ambiguous characters in films such as Johnny English, Walking On Sunshine and Sense And Sensibility, where I met my wife, Emma Thompson." "I would be delighted." "We are humble, celebrity folk who live quite modestly, really." "But, OK, between us we make a fair pile of money." "So it's only right that we hand over a chunk of that to the Government in the form of taxes." "But a lot of rich people try and avoid paying their dues and that makes me angry." "'You can choose how much tax you want to pay...'" "Recently I went on This Morning to talk about a play but found myself ranting about tax, much to the discomfort of the presenters." "The rich, the elite, get away with it and that's disgusting and I do not want to have any part of that system." "It'll be..." "Oh, dear, I'm sounding rather..." "No, it's your opinion..." "It your opinion, it's good to say." "I will say, go and see Kill Me Now at the Park Theatre in London." "Can I..." "It's on until the 29th March because there's every possibility he'll be banged up!" "Maybe This Morning wasn't the best place for a rant, so I thought I'd try my luck at Dispatches." "Good morning." "Now I'm going undercover, playing a morally ambiguous greedy actor," "Greg Wise, seeking to zero his tax bill." "So how do the rich avoid tax and get away with it?" "Do you have a better side." "I don't know." "I get confused." "Today, I'm sitting for photographer Bruce Chatterton." "Can you comfortably keep your head there." "Mm-hm." "As well as taking striking portraits," "Bruce is also an undertaker." "Can you move your head around." "Perhaps a more secure line of employment." "After all, it's said the only two certainties in life are death and taxes." "Or are they?" "It's estimated that evasion and avoidance costs the Exchequer more than £6 billion a year." "Mr Speaker, this budget rewards work." "The Government have long claimed to be fighting back." "I regard tax evasion and indeed aggressive tax avoidance as morally repugnant." "CHEERING" "No government has been tougher than this one in chasing down tax evasion and tax avoidance!" "CHEERING" "Despite the Government's crackdown, in my world there are lots of companies offering to..." ""manage the wealth of the rich"." "One of those is Connaught Corporate Solutions, run by a man called Tony Ashbolt." "Once I've made contact with him via LinkedIn," "I'm directed to a special webinar." "We're in." "Wealth protection." "'We can show you the way that you can choose how much tax you want 'to pay on your income stream." "'It's up to you." "How much you feel is necessary?" "'" "'You can contact Tony and the team at CCS today on 01483...'" "We've got to meet this guy, we've got to get him on the phone." "We've got to get him round." "Tony, hello, I'm earning quite a lot at the moment." "I'm an actor and I'm also rather upset that" "I seem to be the only bugger paying tax." "TONY LAUGHS" "I was wondering if there's anything you can do to help me not pay anything?" "Yeah, sure." "Right." "Right." "All right, thanks." "Bye-bye." "Wow!" "So it's all to do with where I set my moral barometer." "I wonder where the control knob is for that?" "Time to meet Tony face-to-face at my office, which I'm rigging for undercover filming." "BLEEP." "To impress him I've borrowed some of the wife's awards from our house." "Of course, all these are not mine." "I have yet to win..." "HE CHUCKLES ..to win an award." "I think we'll definitely win an award for this documentary." "I think we'll get..." "We'll get a BAFTA for best set dressing." "With the stage set, and the cameras rolling... ..Tony arrives." "Now what would you like to do today, go through the planning more?" "Yeah." "I mean, I-I..." "I sort of got what you were talking about on the phone." "I suppose I'm mostly concerned about being Jimmy Carr-ed." "Yeah." "Er, both sort of, I suppose, pilloried and also whether the taxman is going to land on me like a tonne of bricks." "I can answer all of those questions because..." "Tony is quick to reassure me about his scheme and the numbers who've signed up." "There's about 11,000 people a year do the planning." "It's been around for 26 years." "11,000 via you?" "Not just me, no, there's 50 people like me." "Before long, Tony starts to sketch out his plan to zero my tax bill." "Right, let's show you what you can do as opposed to paying tax in January and July." "Mm-hm." "We set up a trust for you and this trust is set up for suppliers..." "..to your trade, of which you are expressly excluded..." "..as being a beneficiary." "Therefore, if you're not a beneficiary up here, you can't be taxed up here." "All right?" "So this is what Tony is planning to do with my money." "He wants to take it and set up an offshore trust in Belize." "An offshore company is now set up also in Belize to manage the trust's money." "That money is then transferred to a UK limited company owned by me, safe from the clutches of the taxman." "So these are the two that are going to be in Belize?" "Correct." "OK." "The money never goes to Belize, only paper." "We use Belize because they're cheap." "Because they will let you do this structure." "They will let you, in effect, manage your own money." "According to an organisation called the Tax Justice Network, an estimated one seventh of the wealth in the world is invested in hidden offshore havens like Belize, out of the reach of tax authorities." "The figure?" "An eye-watering $26 trillion." "Yep, trillion." "It seems Tony wants my money to keep that money company." "Let's say in a tax year you were going to earn £500,000." "Mm-hm." "That's what you're going to pay tax on." "Mm-hm." "You may say, "Do know what, I'm happy to pay tax on 50 grand."" "Mm-hm." "Or I'm happy to pay tax on 100, it doesn't matter." "Whatever the difference is that you don't want to pay tax on, that's the bit that you put in there." "So I could put all of that into this plc..." "And not pay a pound of tax." "Not pay a pound?" "Correct." "So now you build your wealth from behind this wall." "So any investments you make into anything are tax-free." "OK." "If you want to buy the rest of the street, you can but you do it from in here." "It's the best way to do it." "OK." "Tax-free, nice." "But what about HMRC, won't they come after me?" "So what happens is the revenue write to you, send a letter." "It's usually three pages of questions." "Tell us about the trust?" "They write, they go away, they write again, they go away, they write again." "Invariably, like an old aunt, they've forgotten about..." "So apparently, there's no need to be afraid of HMRC." "In fact, Tony says he uses this scheme himself." "What I do is, I pay a little bit of tax." "I just play the game with them." "All I do is, I declare to them £40,000 a year in income." "From me, I pay around about two or £3,000 year in tax." "That's it." "The rest of my money goes through the trust." "It's something we're going to have to do because..." "Whenever you're ready." "Between me and the missus, we've got..." "A few quid." "We've got a few quid." "She's got more awards than I have but there we are." "So who's are these up here?" "Those are hers." "Those are hers, are they?" "Two Oscars." "Only two." "That's impressive." "Yeah." "Tony, thank you so much for coming over." "Lovely to meet you." "Thank you so much." "My pleasure." "Take care, have a nice time." "Bye-bye." "'We use Belize because they're cheap.'" "Jolyon Maugham QC, is one of UK's top tax barristers." "I meet him at his chambers to show him the footage of my encounter with Tony." "Tony is pitching at a very unsophisticated, greedy market." "'And this trust is set up for suppliers to your trade.'" "The money never goes to your suppliers." "Indeed, it's absolutely of the essence of the scheme that it's available for you to spend." "So the notion that in any way you are making a payment to your suppliers, bears no relationship to reality." "It's an attempt to bamboozle somebody into entering into a thoroughly ugly piece of tax avoidance." "Tony later told us that the tax planning suggested was that of a" "Remuneration Trust and HMRC has always accepted that such trusts are entirely legitimate." "They are similar to numerous plans available to UK taxpayers and used by many thousands every year." "Offshore avoidance schemes like the one Tony's proposing can be investigated by HMRC to see if they've crossed the line from lawful avoidance to unlawful invasion." "Good afternoon, everybody." "Welcome to the Public Accounts Committee." "The department's bosses were recently grilled by the Public Accounts Committee about the pitifully low level of prosecutions for offshore tax schemes over the last five years." "When you said in February to the Committee that you thought there were going to be 15 prosecutions, why hasn't that happened?" "There has in fact been 11 prosecutions and some of those..." "In relation to offshore?" "In relation to offshore?" "Sorry, did you say there have been?" "Yes. 11?" "That's not even two a year." "But according to Richard Brooks, a former tax inspector and now journalist, even these figures are questionable." "He's investigated HMRC's claims for Private Eye." "Of the 11 prosecutions, five were members of the same family." "The father of which, ran a taxi business and they were all just helping him hide his income from his taxi firm." "You know, a taxi firm in Loughborough." "One of them just involved somebody owning a holiday home in France." "This was not high-end offshore financial evasion as most people understood it from HMRC's answers." "They've become very adept at massaging the numbers so that it looks like they're doing better than they are and the reports of their success are a sort of exercise in fiddling the figures themselves, just like the tax dodgers are." "Tonight, I'm at a fundraising gala." "Where actors like me are enticing the wealthy to part with their cash for charity." "My world has always depended on high finance and large investments are encouraged by government tax breaks but are these being used to cut the tax bills of the rich?" "In this Dispatches report," "I'm going undercover to find out how I can avoid tax." "So, any investments you make into anything are now tax-free." "OK." "For decades, governments of every hue have promised to stamp down on the evil of tax avoidance." "But not a hint did Jim Callaghan give us of the secrets in his new budget box as he made his way to the Commons." "Ironically, by making new laws, the situation has actually got worse." "The guidelines have become so long and complex, almost nobody can understand them." "In fact, the growth of the UK tax code has to be seen to be believed." "In 1965, the code was 759 pages, less than one pack of photocopy paper printed both sides." "By 1990, it had grown to 1,865 pages." "By 2009, it had become the longest tax code in the world." "In 2010, the Office for Tax Simplification was set up, and the code got more complicated." "On average, an extra 900 pages a year added under its watch." "By 2015, the guide had reached 22,298 pages." "That's two thirds as long as the Encyclopaedia Britannica." "The code's enormous size and complexity means it's got more holes in it than a Swiss cheese, and is ripe for aggressive exploitation." "Hello." "Welcome back." "Thank you." "It's the Public Accounts Committee that oversees the enforcement of tax regulation." "When I ask a question, I think we'll all get on a lot better if you answer the question that I'm asking." "Stephen Phillips MP is a PAC veteran." "We're dealing with a tax code that is 22,298 pages long." "No-one can get their heads round that." "That's a licence to duck and dive." "I think to a certain extent, it is a licence to duck and dive." "And you say no-one can get their heads around it." "The people who get their heads around it are the extremely expensive, well-paid accountants and tax consultants who will say to you," ""I am going to recommend something to you which," ""even if not tax evasion," ""is a scheme which will result in you paying less tax." ""Don't go out and try and find some complicated scheme" ""where you offshore your money into Luxembourg," ""transport it through Ireland into Grand Cayman," ""back through Bermuda, into London, whatever," ""so that you don't have to pay the tax Parliament thinks you should."" "When you're engaged in that sort of behaviour, you know you're doing wrong." "It may not be a criminal offence, but it's just not right morally." "I'm back in my day job as an actor on the set of The Crown." "This is a Netflix ten-hour extravaganza about the royal family from the late 1940s to the early 1950s." "I'm playing Lord Louis Mountbatten." "We're doing a big scene in here." "I have to go." "Number ones, everybody..." "Dub 1375, take two, A camera, mark." "Lord Mountbatten had a sort of tax break by being royal." "The movie industry has also benefited from tax breaks to encourage production." "Surprisingly, some films have been made as scams." "Unknown to the director and actors, the production of the gritty crime thriller A Landscape Of Lies was a tax fraud, and resulted in five convictions." "The loopholes have since been closed, and new incentives are being offered." "The government has put together something called an Enterprise Investment Scheme, which is where you can invest in small companies that are reasonably high risk, and you get a big chunk of your tax back." "I now call The Right Honourable George Osborne..." "In the budget of 2011, George Osborne souped up EIS." "Next year, we will double the amount that any individual can invest through EIS, increase the size of company that can qualify for investment, and raise the limit on the amount that can be invested in a company by 400%." "But is one of the government's favourite incentives to boost the economy safe from abuse?" "I've been told about a wealth management company promoting an avoidance scheme centred around EIS tax relief." "OK, so here we are at" "Valhalla Private Client Services LLP." "Peter Nichols, who runs Valhalla, is also a non-executive chairman of a film financing company." "Is Peter abusing legitimate government tax breaks?" "I've asked him to come for a meeting." "Again, we're going to be secretly filming." "And part of my team this time is Steve Buttercase, an independent financial adviser." "Greg." "Greg Wise." "Pleased to meet you." "Nice to meet you." "Can I get you a coffee?" "Tea?" "Tea, preferably." "Let me take your jacket for you." "Thanks." "Very good." "Well, thank you so much." "That's all right." "I'm delighted." "Peter is saying he can do this through the use of EIS, by linking it to film production." "For every 100 you invest in an EIS-registered company, the government gives 30 back in tax relief." "That's a nice way to reduce your tax bill." "But Peter is about to suggest I put the money" "I would be paying in tax into an EIS-registered film company, and that investment will be beefed up with a massive risk-free loan, so the relief will be so big, it will wipe out my entire tax bill." "Peter goes on to explain that if I invest in one of his other schemes, anonymity will be guaranteed." "That's very kind." "Thank you so much for all your time." "So the object, it would be to put in 30, get 30 from the taxman, and you can have the gearing if you want." "What Peter is doing is very, very clearly selling you a tax wheeze." "He is selling you something that has got no risk, it's got gearing from some funny foreign banks and hedge funds." "So it's a bad use, it's an abusive use, of the Enterprise Investment Scheme." "Would you class Peter's scheme as being aggressive tax avoidance?" "It's taking a perfectly sensible relief, and he's trying to soup it up so that it delivers to you a tax advantage without any commercial risk." "That's aggressive." "Peter Nichols later told us:" "HMRC doesn't report on the scale of aggressive tax avoidance, so we can only guess at the actual size of this hidden industry." "I've managed to secure an anonymous interview with an insider, whose former company sold tax avoidance products similar to those being promoted by Peter." "We had a core business that was a regulated business." "There was another arm to the business as well." "It was separate." "And the sole purpose of that company being to make people's tax liabilities disappear." "Do you have any idea how much money might have been lost to the Revenue as a result of this?" "I can't give a definite figure." "It would have been way in excess of £100 million." "And that's £100 million from one company?" "Yes." "And it's reasonable to assume that hundreds of millions, if not more than a billion, is being lost to the Revenue every year because of schemes like this." "How fearful do you think your colleagues at your former company would have been of investigation and prosecution by HMRC?" "Not at all." "No, I don't think they would have been concerned in the slightest." "Because it just doesn't happen?" "I've never heard of somebody marketing this sort of scheme in the sort of way that they were being targeted by HMRC." "Ever." "'I can't believe how easily I've found two schemes 'that apparently will zero my tax bill." "'And by the sounds of it, I'm not even going to get caught.'" "A lot of questions to answer for Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs." "But we sat down with them a couple of weeks ago at their press office." "We have sent them repeated e-mails, and they will not talk to me." "They will not be interviewed on camera by an actor." "HMRC later gave us a statement that" ""people tempted by these schemes" ""will be left facing a life-changing bill" ""that can include tax interest and penalties."" "As they won't talk to me on camera," "I'm going back to see Stephen Phillips MP." "If you go down this way..." "OK." "HMRC is undoubtedly doing better than it was, but I think it's also true to say that they could be doing a lot more." "The people they should be going after in order to deter everybody else like you from doing it, are the people at the top end, the people who are earning hundreds of thousands and millions of pounds." "Are you as sad as I am that it's been so easy for me to find people who say that I don't have to pay tax?" "Yes." "I mean, I'm not surprised." "But I think it's "distraught", is the best word to describe it." "Because this is money that should be in the public purse." "We live in a society which is based upon cohesion, and it's just not right that some people are paying their taxes and some people are either avoiding them or indeed, just not paying them at all and are criminals," "and that has to change." "When I started this investigation, I couldn't have imagined the scale and complexity of the avoidance industry or the lack of political will to close it down." "I'll go back to my day job better informed, but even more angry." "Maybe it is all down to where I set my moral barometer." "Now, where's the control knob for that again?" "Subtitles by Ericsson"