Dealing with annual tax avoidance (a course of action designed to conflict with or defeat the evident intention of Parliament) which deliberately exploits loopholes in the law would only be a small part of meeting the debt £375 bn of which has come from bailing out the banks through buying stakes in them and quantitative easing

The best estimate of the annual amount of tax that is avoided by individuals is £13bn and for companies this amount is between £9bn and £12bn.
These are the numbers that HMRC, the Guardian, TUC and the Treasury gave estimated. So anti tax avoidance measures would bring in about £20bn a year.

In 2005 British American Tobacco, the UK-listed cigarette giant, paid just £13 million in corporation tax over the previous five years, despite making pre-tax profits of £9 billion in the same period. by 'choosing' to pay its taxes abroad, dramatically reducing its tax bill in the country where it is headquartered


Tax evasion being illegal is more difficult to calculate
The size of the offshore economy is hard to measure precisely, as a result of its 'fragmented nature, difficulties involved in defining it, and a pervasive culture of secrecy.'

In February 2009 TJN's Richard Murphy produced research for the BBC's Panorama programme estimating conservatively that the UK loses about £18.5 per year to tax havens, including avoidance and evasion.
This, if fully tackled, would be enough to take 4.5p off the basic rate of UK income tax.

In March 2008 HMRC (the UK's Revenue and Customs department) published a report estimating of the UK tax gap - the result of both avoidance and evasion - at between £11bn and £41bn.

Compare this with the DWP report that -

'It is estimated that during 2008/9 around 2.2% or 3.0bn of total benefit expenditure was overpaid due to fraud and error, while around 0.9% or 1.2bn of total benefit expenditure was estimated to have been underpaid

In the 12 months to September 2006, fraud in Income Support and Jobseekers Allowance cost the equivalent of 26p for every £10 that will be spent on the Olympics


In smearing benefit claimants as 'hideous scroungers' perhaps Bozo is doing what psychologists tell us people like 'queer-bashers' notoriously do; that is, they project their own "sins" onto others. -knowing that they themselves are defrauding the economy through tax evasion or avoidance

Perhaps I should ask HIS accountant :)