Woman defrauded taxpayers with 10 fictional children
SARAH Jane Smith, 41, made up ten children to claim benefits. The Sun leads with the woman who “invented” ten children. Smith has two real children, and pretended they were disabled to earn child tax credits.
You can imagine the two children getting into character, each given five new personas and a limp. Mrs Smith also pretended she was disabled. In total, her acting and fiction writing skills earned her £42,000.
You might be outraged. The Sun wants you to be. Smith is the lead story in its Beat The Cheat campaign “to tackle benefit fraud — which costs taxpayers £1.2billion a year”.
Smith, of Salford, was given a six-month jail term suspended for 18 months, plus 120 hours of community service.
She might yet be given a scholarship to RADA.
Everyone is in this together. You need to take out only what is rightfully yours and pay your dues in full.
In 1999, the BBC wrote:
Mr Murdoch’s main British holding company, Newscorp Investments, has paid no net corporation tax within these shores over the past 11 years. This is despite accumulated pre-tax profits of nearly £1.4bn. Payments were made in some years, but in others rebates were claimed.
The Newscorp Investments stable includes newspapers such as The Times and The Sun as well as a 40% share in the satellite broadcaster BSkyB. Had it paid the full 30% rate on its 1998 profit of £309m, it would have netted the Exchequer £92m. (Enough to buy thousands of school textbooks, something that the Murdoch press is currently encouraging parents to do by way of collecting newspaper tokens.)
Hats off to Mr Murdoch for taking advantage of tax loopholes – and they do not arrive by accident but are deliberately set up and not closed by Governments.
The Sun says:
We revealed how benefits cheats are costing a record £1.2billion.
In December 2011, the Daily Mail wrote:
Britain’s biggest firms owe the taxman up to £25.5billion, but are regularly let off the hook, MPs say today.
The sum is equivalent to £1,000 for every British family – or the equivalent of 6p being cut from the basic rate of income tax.
While families, shopkeepers and small businesses are forced to pay their bills in full, big businesses are striking favourable deals and have an ‘far too cosy’ relationship with HM Revenue and Customs.
The New Statesman wrote:
In these straitened times, £25bn could go a long way. It’s the amount that MPs on the Public Accounts Committee claim that HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has failed to collect in “unresolved tax bills”. The nation’s tax collecters stand accused of treating large companies “more favourably” than ordinary taxpayers, of maintaining a “cosy” relationship with the likes of Goldman Sachs and Vodafone, and of providing “no accountability” about whether their deals provide good value for money.
Sarah Jane Smith may care to tun her talents to creating Old Mother Hubbard Corp, and inviting the HMRC over for tea and cake…
Posted: 6th, March 2012 | In: Money Comments (11) | TrackBack | Permalink
