HMRC Says It Will Responsibly Use Advanced Analytics, Automated Triggers and AI to Identify Emerging Risks Among Wealthy Taxpayers Earlier

HM Revenue and Customs, HMRC, published a corporate report, Modernising HMRC's approach to wealthy compliance, on October 28, 2026. It is a plan for how HMRC manages the taxpayers it counts as wealthy, set out in seven themes. HMRC says its commitments against each of these themes "together constitute a multi-year programme of work to modernise HMRC's approach to wealthy compliance." Parts of the plan follow, not the whole.

Data, Triggers and AI

The commitment under the plan's second theme reads, in part, that HMRC "will connect priority customer, ownership and third-party data and responsibly use advanced analytics, automated triggers and artificial intelligence (AI) to identify emerging risks earlier and target compliance activity where it will have greatest impact."

Information about wealthy customers, their assets and the entities and networks connected to them, HMRC says, currently sits across different HMRC systems. It will connect priority data "to create a more complete customer view, reveal relationships that may not be apparent from individual records and reduce the effort needed to gather and reconcile information."

HMRC "will apply improved analytics, automated triggers and responsibly deployed AI to this connected information, alongside intelligence and specialist insight." That, the plan says, will help it identify emerging and significant risks earlier, assess them more consistently, and indicate "where further support, enquiry or specialist intervention may be appropriate."

Tools for Compliance Officers

Under the same theme, HMRC says it "will introduce AI-assisted tools to help compliance officers find relevant case information and guidance, identify patterns and connections, and consider potential risks and next steps." The plan gives examples of what these tools could do: bring together information from multiple case records and documents to produce concise case summaries, answer questions about complex cases, highlight relevant evidence, and help officers locate and navigate HMRC guidance, policies and procedures through natural-language search. HMRC says it will build on these capabilities towards 2030.

Could, in the plan's words.

The same paragraph says that "AI will support, not replace, human decision-making: HMRC colleagues will remain responsible for compliance decisions and will apply their expertise to the facts, evidence and customer circumstances."