I'm sure we must have noted here before the increasing ease with which a commercial business can churn out a meaningless or misleading press release and get it more or less copied and pasted directly into the newspapers.
A story in The Independent today under the headline "HMRC takes hard line on directors" is pretty typical of that:
A sharp increase in disqualification proceedings launched against company directors for failure to pay tax undermines HM Revenue & Customs' insistence that it is taking a more sympathetic approach to businesses facing cashflow problems, independent financing company Syscap has claimed.
There has been a 24 per cent increase in the number of directors facing disqualification proceedings for non-payment of company tax, according to Syscap...
...Though HMRC is now giving struggling firms more time to pay tax, Syscap said the figures suggest that HMRC is increasingly prepared to see individual directors taken to court.
Yes, HMRC endeavours (or at least claims to endeavour) to take a sympathetic approach to sound businesses experiencing cashflow problems via the Business Payment Support Service. But that hasn't got anything at all to do with whether they prosecute directors over non-payment of company tax.
The first system is designed to help companies run prudently and honestly, the second system to deter individuals from running companies either recklessly or dishonestly. There's no overlap between those two groups of taxpayers at all. If a director has done something that leads to a court convicting them and disqualifying them from acting as a director in future, it would have been wholly wrong for HMRC to have taken a sympathetic approach. If HMRC see a director wilfully acting in a dishonest way, it's hardly appropriate to offer to help.
But I guess that doesn't matter to the authors of the study and the journalist, since they've got a good headline out of it and avoided the need to write anything imaginative or thoughtful.
HMRC - please continue to be sympathetic to honest, prudent directors, and entirely unsympathetic to dishonest or reckless ones.