The United Kingdom has officially launched its Strengthened Reward Scheme for tax whistleblowers, marking a historic transformation in the country’s approach to combating serious tax avoidance and evasion.

Announced on November 28 by His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), the new program adopts a US-style incentive model that could deliver multi-million-pound rewards to individuals who report high-value tax fraud.

A Fundamental Shift in UK Tax Enforcement

The new scheme represents a dramatic departure from the UK’s previous informer payment system, which has long been criticized for offering minimal, discretionary awards that failed to incentivize reporting of serious tax crimes.

Under the old model governed by the Commissioners for Revenue and Customs Act 2005, HMRC paid out just 978,256 to all informants combined in the 2023/24 fiscal year—a figure dwarfed by the UK’s estimated 46.8 billion tax gap.

The Strengthened Reward Scheme changes everything. It supplements the existing 2005 Act by creating a parallel pathway specifically designed for high-value cases involving large corporations, wealthy individuals, and offshore or tax avoidance schemes.

Key Features of the New Program

According to HMRC’s official guidance released today, the scheme includes several groundbreaking enhancements:

The most significant change: whistleblowers can now qualify for rewards between 15% and 30% of the tax collected if their information leads to the collection of at least 1.5 million...

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