> Imagine if a policeman stopped and searched your car (legally), and then later came round to your house saying "I didn't have my glasses on, so didn't search

> Imagine if a policeman stopped and searched your car (legally), and then later came round to your house saying "I didn't have my glasses on, so didn't search well enough. I want to search again". Your analogy is invalid, though, because Uber made a legal declaration as part of their VAT return which was based on (at best) an untested interpretation of the law. Their original accounts weren’t the product of a search by HMRC that was incomplete, Uber gave them numbers which were later found to be wrong and asserted (under all the penalties associated with false tax declarations) that they were correct. A better analogy would be if you told a police officer that there weren’t any bodies in the boot of your car, but when they later looked (following a report from a passer-by) you had a collection of severed heads sitting in the back seat.