dishonesty will not be tolerated by the courts

Not to mention that the HMRC is hardly the holy grail when looking for the truth.

It turns out that my husband (who never refused to show me his tax returns but somehow never got around to it) was earning a fortune, or taking it out of the business anyway, and yet organised things in such a way that he paid no tax. Some people are crooks, and some sail pretty close to the wind. The system is imperfect. My x managed to pull the wool over everyone including the forensic accountant - companies starting up all over the place, not lasting long enough to have to file accounts, dealing in cash in 6 figure sums and having no evidence of anything, basically.

If you are ruthless and determined you can find a way, and get various bent advisors onside, and if you started thinking about it while your other half was still blissfully ignorant, and then flat on the floor in floods of tears, you have the advantage.

I don''t have a problem with blatant dishonesty allowing cases to re-open (e.g. spouse has siphoned money into a secret account), but in practice life is rarely black and white. The bar to re-open a case needs to be very high to prevent opportunistic claims.

I can see a host of opportunistic cases, asking for full disclosure of events from many years ago, threatening costs and then without prejudice offers to settle outside of court. Even if a husband had truthfully disclosed everything, many years later he cannot necessarily produce supporting evidence of this and thus he can never be certain a court will see it that way.

Bad times