So for those of you who witnessed a fashion show spectacle in Top Shop, Boots or any of the other large Corporate tax dodging companies in your  local ‘mall’ this morning – the purpose was to raise awareness about the tax gap – and in particular the large amount of tax dodged by some of our best known corporations.

You may have seen some bold headlines/ leaflets displaying just how much tax is lost in the UK every year – an annual total of up to £120 billion – Just to prove we’re not making this up – here are a few sources for those of you who wish to research this in more depth.

Firstly, this is a nice article from the Guardian explaining the ‘tax gap’. The tax gap is the difference between collected tax and the potential total tax out there. The gap is caused by tax avoidance, evasion, black markets, errors and lack of “reasonable care” when filling in tax returns. Currently, the lowest estimate puts the figure at £42bn a year: the highest around £120bn. Either way, even if 10% of this amount was recovered, it would significantly reduce the necessity of wholesale cuts to government.

Secondly, this Article from The Metro outlining how Britain loses £18 billion a year because of companies being registered in Tax Havens. The multinationals listed on the FTSE 100 have a total of 32,216 subsidiary companies between them, with one in four based in tax havens

Obviously UK Uncut s a good ‘hub source’ – currently focussing on Corporate tax dodgers – cut (is that a pun?) from its web site

There’s a selection box of high street stores, hoping for huge sales this Christmas, who’ve been very bad. This year Vodafone paid a £6bn dividend to its shareholders, whilst still refusing to pay us the £6bn tax it owes us. Topshop, Dorothy Perkins and Miss Selfriges are all part of Sir Philip Green’s fashion empire Arcadia, but whilst they sell Christmas presents on our high streets, the profits go to Monaco. Boots dodged another year of tax by keeping their headquarters registered to a post box in Switzerland. And then there’s the big banks. Not only do banks like Barclays continue to receive huge taxpayer subsidies, but they also use tax havens to avoid paying their fair share back to society.

NB – The real message we want to get accross is that if we collected all this tax, we wouldn’t need to cut spending on public services!