Ex-HMRC boss Dave Hartnett to be grilled over HSBC Swiss tax dodgers

FORMER HM Revenue & Customs chief Dave Hartnett is to be grilled tomorrow by MPs over why he failed to prosecute more HSBC customers for alleged tax evasion.

Hartnett is set to appear before the Public Accounts Committee and chairwoman Margaret Hodge is expected to take him to task for failing to do more with a list, leaked in 2010, of 6,000 former clients of HSBC’s Swiss private bank.

So far only one individual has been successfully prosecuted.

After he retired from HMRC in 2012, Hartnett advised HSBC on financial crime and in 2013 became an adviser to accountancy giant Deloitte.

He is best known for a series of disasters that befell HMRC under his watch.

In 2010 he was widely attacked for refusing to apologise after it emerged that six million people either had too much or too little tax deducted due to errors in the pay-as-you-earn system.

He later issued an unreserved apology.

In 2011, HMRC admitted that 1.2 million taxpayers were owed an average of £600 after it gave them the wrong tax codes.

In October 2007, a HMRC official lost two child-benefit discs containing the personal details of 25 million people and in July 2011 it emerged that it could not send reminder letters to people to pay their taxes because it had run out of letterheaded paper.