News Article - 24 May 2012
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HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) is to ask the government to give it more wide-ranging powers to help it tackle tax fraud.

It will ask for new powers that would allow it to arrest suspects, take fingerprints and search people and property without the supervision of the police.

Some in the accountancy profession have already spoken out against the creation of such powers, however, fearing that they may cause friction between HMRC and the business community.

Speaking to the Times, Mike Warburton, a tax partner at Grant Thornton, said the police-like powers were potentially "frightening".

"Customs have always had greater powers because their ethos was that they were trying to catch villains. Now that revenue and customs are under one banner, I fear that this is the direction that the taxman is headed as well," he said.

The news comes after a major HMRC investigation into suspected VAT fraud led to 22 detentions around the UK.

Gordon Miller, deputy director of HMRC Investigation, said the operation was "part of a large-scale, international criminal investigation into frauds that may run to hundreds of millions of pounds".

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