Don't know how this may affect some of the readers of this forum but this made the national news here today.
From The Times Online:
The government will this week announce an unprecedented amnesty for hundreds of thousands of people with offshore assets, including holiday homes, as it seeks to recover billions of pounds in unpaid tax.
Taxpayers will be given two months to declare unpaid tax on rent from foreign properties, or on cash stashed in accounts in the Channel Islands and other tax havens. Those coming forward will be charged a reduced penalty of 10 per cent compared with 100% in normal circumstances.
Once the amnesty expires in June, Revenue & Customs officials are planning a crack-down on offshore assets using aggressive new powers including sharing information with tax authorities abroad.
The reprieve applies not only to dishonest taxpayers who have wilfully withheld tax, but also to ordinary people who may have innocently underpaid tax because of a simple mistake, or who may not realise they had to declare overseas income. The Revenue estimates that as many as one in five people are not declaring overseas interest.
The amnesty was expected to apply only to savers with bank accounts in offshore centres such as Jersey, but The Sunday Times has learnt that at the last minute it has been quietly extended to people who own second homes abroad. An estimated 300,000 British people have bought properties overseas, most of them in France and Spain, and about half are thought to earn an income by letting them out for at least part of the year, according to Grant Thornton, an accountant.
Thousands of holiday-home owners now face an anxious few weeks trawling through their records and deciding whether to own up now, or face much higher penalties once the two-month amnesty ends on June 22.
Revenue & Customs has vowed to “track people downâ€