I move amendment No. 62:
In page 17, line 6, after "section" to insert "if the court is satisfied that the said offence has resulted from a civil fraud, a substantial mis-declaration or significant omissions of material fact, and".
There is a major material difference between section 11 and section 9. Section 9 deals with those people for whom earlier sections were doing a favour. Section 11 deals with everyone, not just for those who want to come clean now but everyone who is in the system carrying the can and paying their way. If there is any false statement in one's tax return or if anyone aids or abets that, we are down to the same question of summary conviction involving a term not exceeding 12 months or on conviction and indictment, a term not exceeding eight years. In other words, this is for everyone, not only those who have been outside the system waiting on amnesties. There has got to be some gradation in this and I have already given the suggestion from the Keith Commission in the UK and from the Commission on Taxation. Whatever about the practice of going to court and prosecuting people, if we legislate without some reference to the degree of seriousness of the misdeclaration, it can be used as a considerable moral suasion on the part of Revenue.
Some cases can be reasonably trivial. I do not think that the law should be entitled to treat in the same way some who had not declared a few hundred pounds interest on money in a bank account and someone who set out through civil fraud to cheat the Revenue up to the eyeballs in respect of due taxes. There have got to be ways of distinguishing between those operating within the law and others.
The Minister said that people have been fined sums of between 5p and £10. This, apparently, is despite the fact that Deputy Dukes had gone to the extent of putting the minimum figure at £1,000 as far back as 1983. There have got to be ways around this. I have used the phrase "that the fines be proportional to the extent of the fraud, the misdeclaration or the omission concerned". I did not define it beyond that because I wanted to put it down as a marker. If however you were to accept that principle you could borrow a phrase from section 10 which states that where mitigation was being considered it could not be greater than 50 per cent of the amount of the fine or penalty. You could put in a minimum amount so that if a judge had the discretion not to go down the imprisonment route in respect of degrees of offence, he could impose a fine of not less than 50 per cent of the tax fiddle it was related to. Revenue is then not going to bring in a 10p tax fiddle for a 5p fine. There could be general proportionality so that if Revenue wanted to follow up the £500 undeclared interest income from a bank account the fine would be a minimum of £250. If it is a case that the fraud was £1 million the minimum fine would be £500,000. I have not put down those amounts because I wanted to establish a discussion on the principle; it is an important principle and it can be provided for. An alternative to putting in the absolute line I suggested, of 50 per cent of the misdeclaration being the minimum fine, is that it might be possible by regulation for the Minister, having consulted the Revenue authorities, to have some scale of value.
We have had a long debate here about civil injury cases and I know that there is always argument if one talks to lawyers. For example if someone was impaired to the point of being blinded in an accident and this was worth £20,000 in a civil injuries case, there is then a row with the lawyer in that if it was the eye of one of the most attractive and well paid models in the world as opposed to that of some old and ugly christian brother who had retired, that the two eyes would not have an equality of value and therefore one cannot put down values. Scales of value can be difficult to determine. In section 11 the Minister is puting down something for every taxpayer in the system and not just for those who are being accommodated by the charter we dealt with earlier. The Minister is saying to all those people, with no de minimus rule, that if they are caught with any false statement, which could be either trivial or major, the only option open to the court is to put them in prison, thereby giving them a criminal record, or to put them into community service with a criminal record. There is no other alternative and that is unreasonable. I do not carry a brief for people who cheat but if some scale of fraudulent intent in the knowing misdeclarations was introduced a set of fines proportional to the offence and a set of offences proportional to the intention could be conceived; both are missing from this legislation.
I would regard it as a very bad piece of legislation if this were to be incorporated in law as the proposition of two wrongs making a right — the bank robber turned vigilante or the poacher turned gamekeeper. We should not balance out all of the offensiveness that one side of this causes to many people by not being reasonable on the other side. I strongly urge the Minister to open up other possibilities. This is not to say to let people off. Get them and hammer them but do so in proportion to the intention of their misrepresentation and in proportion to the effect of the economic worth of the misrepresentation. That is easily drafted. I could draft it before we go to lunch today. I appeal to the Minister to include it.
The Minister talked about the other branch of the administration of justice and the definition of justice. It has its own way and its own modus operandi. It may take the view in many cases that it does not want to leave people with a criminal record which is serious, even for relatively minor offences and even if one did community service. I would not like to think that, because there was no flexibility, future dodgers would get away with things because a court took the view that he or she should not have a criminal record. There must be a way of allowing some discretion to the court, other than imprisonment or a suspended sentence that is proportional to the misdeclaration and where the fine is proportional to the extent of the economic worth of the misdeclaration.