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Taxpayer Info to be Given to Researchers
The UK tax authority has courted controversy by writing to 'a couple of hundred' taxpayers giving them a little over a week to opt out of having their names and details passed to a market research company.
HM Revenue & Customs is giving them until tomorrow (Tuesday) to object, according to the Telegraph newspaper (www.telegraph.co.uk ). The move comes almost exactly a year after HMRC admitted losing disks containing information about 25 million Child Benefit recipients.
HMRC has selected the letter recipients from around 44,000 people who took advantage of the Offshore Disclosure Facility (ODF), an 'amnesty' that ran between June and November last year for those who had previously failed to declare offshore assets. HMRC says details will be passed to a 'completely independent research company' with the aim of exploring 'customer experiences' of the ODF using 45-60 minute interviews.
Accountants expressed their disbelief and questioned the legality of the move given that the authority is revealing data on people who admitted to being in breach of tax regulations. However, a spokesman for HMRC told the paper: 'The research company receives the data on the same strictly confidential basis that we do. They are subject to rigorous security checks before their appointment. We are satisfied that we are not in breach of our statutory duty of confidentiality or the Data Protection Act. Customers who get a letter who don't wish to take part are entirely free to opt out.'
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