Offshore is the key word in much tax avoidance.

Moving assets offshore – even things like song copyrights – and then hiding ownership through trusts allows people to pay much less tax.

It may be legal but the only objective is to avoid paying tax where the money is earned, very often in the UK.

Many tax havens play a key part, but so too do the UK banks, lawyers and accountants who set up these schemes.

Being technically domiciled outside the UK, like Fiona, isn’t the only way to live and work tax-free in this country.

If you’re wealthy enough to live abroad then you can exploit the UK’s residence rules to get out of our tax system. If you’re here for less than 90 days a year you can still be non-resident, but because of doubts about what a day is for tax purposes (hard to believe, but true) a person can sometimes be in the UK on four days a week for more than 40 weeks a year and still not pay UK tax.

The rule has been abused by the so-called ‘Monaco boys’ (and girls, Ed) – city slickers who commute by jet to London on Mondays and leave on Thursdays.

Kerching! says: “It’s a tough job but someone’s got to do it!”

See how he does it below…

When most people go to work they get paid a wage for what they do and that’s the end of it. When you’re a professional sports person, like Jason, on thousands a week it’s all a little more complex than that.

You have your employment contract for blitzing a car around a track for sure, but many also get paid serious sums by their teams for the use of their ‘image rights’.

Yes, that’s their photos to you and me.

And those payments go to companies they own, where much lower rates of tax can be paid than would the case if they received the money as part of their salary, or the income can be diverted to other family members (reducing the effective tax rate), or offshore in the case of foreign sporting stars.

Where would you stick your pics? Here’s our top twenty tax havens:

Andorra, Anguilla, Antigua, Antilles, Aruba, Bahamas, Belize, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Cook Isles, Guernsey, Isle of Man, Jersey, Liechtenstein, Mauritius, Monaco, Panama, Thailand, Turks & Caicos Islands, United Arab Emirates.

KERCHING!  Tax scam special feature

How to tax people who live together, are married or are in civil partnerships has been a perennial problem for the UK tax system. But people like Bill abuse the tax system when income clearly belonging to one partner in a relationship appears to be paid to the other and tax is saved as a result.

This is easy to arrange when one partner has a personal service company through which they sell services that might otherwise be subject to PAYE or lives offshore. It’s all too easy in these cases for that personal service company to pay an income to the lower paid partner and save tax.

left, Christina endures another hard day’s work at the poolside of her Monaco home [office, surely? Ed]

And here’s how he does it…

Tax avoiders like star funny man Jamie make sure their income that should be taxed in the UK ends up in an offshore company or trust (and maybe both).

There are numerous ways to do this. Having deposited the income in an offshore tax haven like Liechtenstein, it’s then lent back to the tax avoider in the UK. They pay only a tiny amount of interest but never actually settle the loan in full. And of course the few top-earners who get caught out give the very many entertainers who pay their tax in full, and don’t earn anything like enough to use these dodges a bad name.

The result is that almost all the tax avoider’s income escapes UK tax while they and live in the UK.

Liechtenstein – very popular with celebs who avoid paying UK income tax by setting up trust funds there

Thanks to loopholes in government legislation, generous tax reliefs are available to film makers.

Lauren finances film for tax relief bombshell.

See how she does it below…

Films have been the subject of more tax avoidance than almost anything else in recent years. Every government wants to have films made in their country, and there is nothing wrong in helping this through tax reliefs.

However, those reliefs have been abused in recent years by what’s called leveraging. That means that most of the film is funded with borrowed money but the tax avoiding investors like Lauren get tax relief on all that’s spent on the film, whether it’s paid for with borrowed money or from their own funds.

The result is that the total relief they get can be as much or even more than they actually invest themselves.

Indeed, that’s exactly why the government makes them available to all who need them.

But there is a problem when a so-called personal service company is used to disguise what is really an employment relationship. If that’s done PAYE is avoided and the result is that in most such cases little or no national insurance is paid by the employer and employee that are party to this abuse.

That can save around 20% overall tax on a salary – and that’s something the country can ill afford.

There has been much debate in 2012 about whether giving money to charity is tax avoidance or not, after George Osborne’s announcement in the March budget and his subsequent U-turn.

For the vast majority the Gift Aid rules on giving to charity are a sensible and appropriate incentive to donate. But there have been marketed schemes that have abused them.

For example, a tax adviser has gone to prison for selling a scheme that over claimed Gift Aid relief. The scheme did this by substantially and artificially increasing the value of shares bought by people in the scheme.

People like Dan then gifted those shares to charities and claimed back more Gift Aid relief on that gift of shares than they’d paid for the shares in the first place.

Other schemes abusing Gift Aid are now coming to light.

Home is where the green stuff is.

The domicile rule can be a tax dodger’s best friend. Most people who live in the UK are taxable on their worldwide income, but if you live here but can show that this is not your ‘natural home’ then you can claim to not be domiciled in the UK.

In that case you’re only taxed here on what you earn in or bring to the UK, and if you’re rich and can place most of your income offshore that means the UK is about as good a tax haven as the world has to offer.

The abuse is in making sure that any cash that is sent to the UK is not considered to be income – so no tax at all is paid, when even under the domicile rule it should be.

Canary Wharf to Monaco Marina: a popular commute home for city-slicking non-doms.

Employee benefit trusts are a variation on the loan back scheme. A person’s employer pays money into an offshore trust – often in Jersey – and that trust then loans the employee money.

The employee has to pay interest at a tiny percentage rate on the loan but never actually repays the loan. The result is that they avoid almost all tax on the income paid this way.

HM Revenue & Customs has tried to stop these schemes but some seem to survive.