Cardiff man receives tax bills for more than 10,000 Chinese companies
When Dylan Davies from Cardiff went to check his letter box last November, 580 brown covers fell to the ground.
Over the following six months, he collected tax bills for 11,000 Chinese firms after they fraudulently used his Cardiff home address to register for VAT.
“It’s been terrible,” said Mr Davies, who received letters from HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) asking for tax amounting to £500,000. HMRC realised the situation did not raise alarm bells at the tax headquarters.
“You’d think there’d be procedures with the technology today that would have picked it up instantly,” Mr Davies said. He told the cops and HMRC, but the brown envelopes kept coming.
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When letters from debt collection agents began to come, he got even more nervous that bailiffs may come “blaming the door down” and feared that the amount of cash involved meant his home could be taken.
He said HRMC only began to take notice when he took his problems to BBC Wales consumer programme X-Ray.
The director of HMRC acknowledged the issue in a letter to the Commons public accounts board.
Permanent secretary Jim Harra stated: “2,356 of the firms have a tax debt, and we have acted to stop any further contact with this address about these debts.”
Source – BBC
