Treasury Secretary Mel Stride has issued a stern warning to taxpayers – watch this to find out what about and why it’s so important!

Transcript:

Hi and welcome to another episode of Baranov TV, designed to demystify the world of accounts and tax and help your business grow.

Now today’s episode really isn’t that cheery!

It’s much more of a warning really. Treasury Minister Mel Stride has come out recently and reminded taxpayers that because the revenue are processing tax refunds for the 2017-18 year, criminals are actually taking advantage of the situation and are sending emails and text messages in particular targeting taxpayers who might release personal data, account details, that kind of stuff that could leave them open for fraud. So the advice from Mel Stride is to make sure that you don’t follow any links, and you don’t download any documents that are sent to you because they could contain viruses, they could contain malware, or they could, if you give bank details, you could find that your bank account is empty!

So, how do you get around this problem?

Well essentially if you’re a client, if you receive anything, just send it on to us. Because you don’t need to deal with any refund application or anything from the Revenue that’s what we’re here to do. So if you’re a client, please send it to us.

If you’re not, you might want to talk to us! But in all seriousness, you just need to be really, really careful.

The Revenue have made very clear for a very long time that they will never ever email a taxpayer about a refund, they will never text, they will never leave you a voicemail. They will only inform you of a refund either by post or through your employer.

So if they’re contacting you about a refund, it doesn’t matter how legitimate it looks, if it’s an email or a text message, it’s not going to be legitimate.

So what can you do about it, because these are really common and they’re becoming more and more prevalent?

Well realistically you can report them. There’re two main ways of doing it for SMS or email. If it’s an SMS, you can send the text message on, and you can send it to 60599.

And if it’s an email, you can send it to the HMRC phishing team whose email address is phishing, which I’ll put on the bottom of the screen, phishing@hmrc.gsi.gov.uk. They’ve got a team of people who will follow that through and they will do their best to actually crack down and stop those happening because there are more and more people falling foul of it.

If you’re unsure in any way, do please get in touch with us, we’re here to help. That’s what we’re here to do and we’d really like to help you sort it out. Please don’t fall foul.

I’ll leave you with that cheery subject and I’ll see you all very soon.