Pension scammers are acting with impunity and few have ever been held to account, according to industry body The Pension Scams Industry Group (PSIG).

The Government and HMRC are not doing enough to stop pension scams and assist victims, according to Margaret Snowdon, Chair of the PSIG.

She claimed in a speech outside Downing Street yesterday that HMRC and the Government have acted like bullies in their treatment of pension scam victims.

She said: “HMRC and the government also blamed the victims, but worse than that, they assumed that all victims were guilty of trying to avoid tax. This is far from the truth.

"Ordinary people don’t understand complex pension rules and they certainly don’t associate pensions with tax, let alone tax avoidance. Nonetheless, HMRC treats them all as if they were guilty of cheating the taxman.

“Therefore, on top of losing most of their savings, HMRC has pursued them for tax charges for over a decade; and has pursued them in an unnecessarily aggressive way. Now to be fair to HMRC, their job is to collect tax that is due. They say they have no choice, but it is never reasonable to bully and frighten people and treat them as criminals without any evidence. It’s a case of when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

She called on the Government to change pension taxation laws to give HMRC the power to 'disapply' tax charges in cases where losses were due to dishonesty by a third party.

In her speech she said PSIG have concerns about suicides, bankruptcies, hardship and severe welfare issues among victims of pension scams due to HMRC’s focus on recovering tax from the taxpayer rather than from the fraudsters.

More than £2.6bn has been stolen through investment fraud in the UK since the start of 2020, according to research by the Pensions Management Institute earlier this month.

The data, obtained through FOI requests, revealed there were almost 100,000 victims of investment fraud between 2020 and 2023.

The Pension Scams Industry Group is a voluntary body created by the pensions industry to help share good practice and reduce the risk of scams through consistently applied practical due diligence and sharing information on real-time scam threats and trends.