HM Revenue and Customs
UK government non-ministerial department (2005-)
His Majesty's Revenue and Customs (commonly known as HMRC) is a department of the UK government responsible for the collection of taxes, the payment of some forms of state support, the administration of other regulatory regimes including the national minimum wage, and the issuance of national insurance numbers.
HMRC was formed by the merger of the Inland Revenue and HM Customs and Excise, which took effect on 18 April 2005. The department's logo is the Tudor Crown enclosed within a circle.
Departmental responsibilities
HMRC is one of the largest UK government departments. The department is responsible for the administration and collection of direct taxes including Income Tax, Corporation Tax, Capital Gains Tax (CGT) and Inheritance Tax (IHT), indirect taxes including Value Added Tax (VAT), excise duties and Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT), and environmental taxes such as Air Passenger Duty and the Climate Change Levy. Other aspects of the department's responsibilities include National Insurance Contributions (NIC), the distribution of Child Benefit and some other forms of state support including the Child Trust Fund, enforcement of the National Minimum Wage, administering anti-money laundering registrations for Money Service Businesses and collection and publication of the trade-in-goods statistics. Responsibility for the protection of the UK's borders passed to the UK Border Agency within the Home Office on 1 April 2008 and then to UK Border Force and the National Crime Agency in 2013; however, HMRC officers are also regularly deployed at the border to assist on operations.
HMRC is also a law enforcement agency, responsible for investigating and tackling tax fraud, excise (tobacco & alcohol) fraud, smuggling, money laundering and a number of other types of offences against the Treasury. The criminal investigation department, known as Fraud Investigation Service (FIS), is part of its Customer Compliance Group, .
Powers of officers
HMRC has a cadre of criminal investigators responsible for investigating Serious Organised Fiscal Crime.
“HM Revenue and Customs” enters the record as uK government non-ministerial department (2005-). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Revenue, Customs and government can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“HM Revenue and Customs” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Revenue, Customs and government provides the most credible route into that argument.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q166559. Authority coordinates are 51.502, -0.127. 1 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2005, 2008 and 2013.
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This entry incorporates text from “HM Revenue and Customs” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.