£2bn tax gap over pensions, says CBI

THE Treasury is facing a £2bnn tax shortfall because of the black hole in company pension schemes, the CBI has warned.

The CBI also said Gordon Brown had got his sums badly wrong on his 'fat-cat' plans to put a lid on the amount bosses can put into their own retirement funds.

A survey for the CBI, whose annual conference started in Birmingham today, reveals that the number of senior employees caught in the move actually runs into hundreds of thousands.

The survey found that half the companies in Britain from minnows to multinationals have had to pump cash into corporate-retirement schemes to make up deficits because of underfunding or the slide in the value of funds' investments.

It also found that companies will be injecting more money into their pension funds next year, up by about 12% to an average of £13.3m per business.

CBI chief economist Ian McCafferty said that across the whole of British business, this means an additional £8bn a year will be pumped into pension funds to make up deficits - leading to a £2bn loss in the tax the Treasury can take from corporate earnings.

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