HMRC wrong again on the scale of Corporate Tax Avoidance

I recently came across this segment of an article whilst researching my EPQ piece on tax avoidance, and found it fascinating in the way it ably demonstrates the sparsely documented scale of tax avoidance by large corporations.
“A fascinating parliamentary answer by David Gauke MP, the Exchequer Secretary responsible for HMRC to Michael Meacher gives an extraordinary insight into a number of critical tax issues.
This is the exchange, which was noted on Tuesday:
Mr Meacher: To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer pursuant to the answer of 13 May 2013, Official Report, column 29W, on taxation: business, how many large businesses contributed to HM Revenue and Customs’ total additional revenue of £6.9 billion gained via compliance activity in 2011-12. [156966]
Mr Gauke: HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) deals with around 10,400 large businesses. The largest 800 businesses are managed within HMRC’s Large Business Service and 381 of those businesses contributed £5.0 billion additional revenue in 2011-12 as a result of HMRC’s compliance activities.
The remaining large businesses are managed within HMRC’s Local Compliance (Large and Complex Unit) and from these HMRC secured £1.9 billion additional compliance revenue in 2011-12. The information to show how many businesses were involved in the enquiries that produced this additional revenue could be provided only at a disproportionate cost.
Now let’s analyse that.
First, let’s note that £5 billion of extra money was raised from just 381 large businesses in the UK in 2011-12. That is an average of £13.1 million each.That’s a staggering scale of tax avoidance per company.
But let’s look at the total next. According to HMRC’s most recent estimate of the tax gap total tax avoidance was £5 billion a year. However, since just 381 companies were seeking to avoid £5 billion in tax (and remember this excludes the well documented multi billion pound abuse of IT companies) it is obviously impossible that this estimate is right. “
I think that this article is a pertinent , accurate, and powerful demonstration of the scale of the problem of tax avoidance by both large domestic and large transnational corporations. HMRC’s most recent estimate of the amount of tax avoided by corporations stood at £5 billion, yet just 381 corporations have been found here to be avoiding that much in tax.
There are two possible implications of this ; Either HMRC simply has no idea of the scale of tax avoidance by large corporations, or it does not wish to face the problem full-on and instead chooses to hide behind what is clearly a vastly reduced estimate. Given both the scale of the problem, and the fact that a copious quantity of (taxpayer’s ) money has been invested into HMRC to solve the increasingly prevalent problem of tax abuse, by individuals, criminals, and corporations, either prospect is worrying.