HMRC Assigns Compliance Managers to More Than 200 Billionaires
HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), the UK's tax authority, is assigning a dedicated customer compliance manager to more than 200 billionaires, The Guardian reported on 29 October 2026. A compliance manager is a named official who works with a taxpayer on their tax affairs and helps them meet their obligations.
HMRC said the wealthy-compliance work would contribute at least £500m toward a commitment to raise £10bn of additional tax revenue by 2030. The £500m is the sum the crackdown is meant to raise for the public purse.
The scope is broader than UK residents. HMRC has, for the first time, compiled a list of billionaires who must pay tax in the UK even if they do not formally live in the country. Each billionaire with a UK tax footprint is being allocated a compliance manager.
Those managers are to offer each billionaire voluntary discussions before they file their taxes. The aim, as described, is to build a shared understanding of UK tax affairs. HMRC defines wealthy individuals as those with income above £200,000 or assets over £2m in any of the last three years.
HMRC also plans to use advanced analytics, automated triggers and artificial intelligence to spot emerging risks from wealthy individuals earlier. Those are intended to flag problems before they grow, rather than after a tax return has been examined.
The scale of the issue is set out in HMRC's estimate of the "tax gap", the difference between the tax that should be paid and the tax actually collected. For 2024-25, the wealthy tax gap was estimated at £3.6bn. That is equivalent to 6% of the total tax gap across the UK's entire tax-paying population.
HMRC already runs a specialist team that takes what it describes as a proactive and co-operative approach to securing compliance from wealthy customers. Earlier parliamentary reporting said HMRC's compliance work with wealthy taxpayers brought in an additional £5.2bn of tax revenue in 2023-24.
The crackdown comes as wealth at the top continues to rise. In January, Oxfam said billionaire wealth had reached its highest level on record, a figure reported by Reuters.
