Corporate offences of failure to prevent criminal facilitation of tax evasion introduced

Implementation date: 30 September 2017

The Criminal Finances Act 2017 introduces two new corporate offences of failure to prevent criminal facilitation of UK tax evasion and failure to prevent criminal facilitation of foreign tax evasion by persons working on behalf of a business. The organisation has a defence if it has put in place reasonable measures to prevent persons associated with it from committing tax evasion facilitation offences or it was not reasonable to expect the organisation to have any prevention procedures in place. The penalty is a fine.

The Government has published guidance on the procedures that organisations can put in place to prevent persons acting in the capacity of an associated person from committing these offences.