Crackdown on avoidance raises £23bn - huh?

[Platypus]

Have we done this?
BBC News - HMRC crackdown yields record £23.9bn in additional tax

How does a crackdown on avoidance lead to £23bn in additional revenue? The article says HMRC has simply collected taxes that were due

[TheFaQQer]

Because of the way that they calculate £23bn.

A large chunk of it is make believe - it is a guess of how much extra companies / people are paying now because they have been scared into making changes in their tax affairs because of legislative changes.

In the same way that HMRC can "prove" that IR35 makes £500million a year because some people have chosen the umbrella route (with no evidence to support that number), HMRC can do the same to show that the anti-tax avoidance measures brought in by Osborne are really, really successful (even if they aren't, and the UK is quite good at tax avoidance measures)

[The Spartan]

It's the spending that the government really needs to get to grips it doesn't matter how much you raise if you're constantly overspending, like TheFaQQer said it's all make believe.

[MicrosoftBob]

Next months fiction is presumably that we're fighting deflation

[TheCyclingProgrammer]

I read earlier that the figure includes tax they hope to recover in the future as a result of current investigations, not just tax they've actually collected to date. Don't have a source unfortunately.