The Treasury has made a narrow but material change to HMRC’s public naming regime for deliberate tax defaulters. The Finance Act 2009 (Publishing Details of Deliberate Tax Defaulters: Increase to Threshold) Order 2026 was made on 9 September 2026, laid before the House of Commons on 11 September 2026 and comes into force on 2 October 2026. According to the statutory instrument, article 2 replaces the figure of £25,000 in section 94(1)(b) of the Finance Act 2009 with £50,000. The effect is not to create a new power, but to narrow the range of cases in which HMRC may publish details of a person who has been penalised for a deliberate default.
Section 94 of the Finance Act 2009 is the legal basis for HMRC to publish information about deliberate tax defaulters, including names, where the statutory conditions are met. The explanatory note to the Order states that the existing rule applied where the tax lost exceeded £25,000. From 2 October 2026, that figure becomes £50,000. The wording remains important: the legislation continues to refer to tax lost that exceeds the threshold. In practical terms, a case involving exactly £50,000 of lost tax would not meet this part of the publication test. The amount would need to be above £50,000, alongside the other conditions in section 94.
In plain English, the Order moves a band of cases out of HMRC’s public naming scheme. A deliberate default with £30,000 or £40,000 of tax lost could previously fall within scope for publication, assuming the rest of the legal test was met. After 2 October 2026, those cases will no longer qualify for publication under section 94 because the amount does not exceed £50,000. That distinction matters because the deliberate tax defaulters list is one of HMRC’s main public windows into civil tax non-compliance. Raising the trigger concentrates the naming power on larger cases and reduces visibility over deliberate defaults in the £25,000 to £50,000 range.
The Order is also notable for what it does not change. It does not amend the concept of a deliberate default, and it does not remove the requirement that the person has been penalised before publication can take place. The Treasury has adjusted only the monetary threshold in section 94(1)(b). For taxpayers and advisers, that means the change should not be read as a broader rewrite of HMRC’s compliance framework. The instrument concerns whether details can be published under this specific regime, not whether HMRC can identify underpaid tax or pursue liabilities and penalties through other parts of the tax code.
From an accountability perspective, the immediate consequence is straightforward. Conduct that would previously have exposed a person to public naming where the tax lost was above £25,000 may now remain outside this particular publication regime unless the amount exceeds £50,000. The reputational sanction of being publicly identified is therefore reserved for a smaller set of deliberate defaults. That has consequences for external scrutiny. Businesses carrying out due diligence, journalists tracking enforcement patterns and researchers using HMRC’s published data will see a narrower picture after 2 October 2026. Any comparison with earlier lists will need to account for the threshold change; otherwise a fall in published cases could be misread as a fall in deliberate default itself.
The legislative record is concise. The instrument was made by the Treasury under the power in section 94(12) of the Finance Act 2009 and was signed by Christian Wakeford and Shaun Davies as two of the Lords Commissioners of His Majesty’s Treasury. The explanatory note also records that section 94 was previously amended by section 164 of the Finance Act 2016. The same note points readers to a Tax Information and Impact Note published on 13 July 2026 and states that it remains an accurate summary of the impacts applying to the instrument. That point matters because the Order itself is brief; the wider administrative case for the change sits outside the operative text.
For compliance teams, the practical task is to update internal guidance before 2 October 2026. Any explanation of HMRC’s deliberate defaulters regime that still refers to a £25,000 trigger will be out of date once the Order takes effect. For the public, the change is simpler but still important. After 2 October, absence from HMRC’s published naming list will no longer indicate that a deliberate default involved less than £25,000 of lost tax. The relevant statutory line will be higher, at more than £50,000, which changes how HMRC’s published enforcement data should be read.