What’s his latest role?
Actor Greg Wise has taken on the role of a rather different protagonist as of late: the tax evader. The husband of actress Emma Thompson has been covertly posing as someone seeking to zero his tax bill as part of a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary.
A bit like Undercover Boss?
Sort of. He secretly filmed meetings with men who promised they could get his tax bill right down and then got lawyers to decipher what they planned to do. The show, How the Rich Avoid Tax, airs at 8pm on 8 February.
Did he learn the tricks of the trade?
The 49-year-old star of Madame Bovary said yesterday that he was surprised by the dirty secrets he learnt about the world of tax avoidance. He wrote in the Observer: “I discovered a smoke and mirrors world - complex schemes put together to form a money-go-round, where cash goes from my left pocket to my right pocket via an offshore "vehicle", losing any way it can be taxed on its journey…I knew this would be a murky business, but wasn't prepared for the murk I found with the HMRC.”
How much tax avoidance are we talking?
Mr Wise said the government figure for the tax gap is calculated at £34bn. That sum makes last year’s NHS deficit estimate of 2bn look like a drop in the ocean.
Don’t HMRC catch tax avoiders?
According to Mr Wise, HMRC celebrate prosecuting around 1,000 tax avoiders each year. However, they go after the “low-hanging fruit”, such as people who claim tax credits illegally, and “turn a blind eye to the serious amounts being aggressively avoided.”
A new crusade?
This undercover mission might come as a surprise to some, but it is a problem Mr Wise has felt passionately about for a long time. The actor, who lives in a house with an estimated worth of £4million in Hampstead, North London, with his wife and two children, voiced his anger towards tax avoidance to the Evening Standard last year. He said that companies like “HSBC haven’t even been slapped on the wrist [because of this] beautiful grey area between avoidance and evasion. It’s iniquitous. We need to do something — COME ON!”
