The National Audit Office’s Standard Report on HM Revenue and Customs accounts provides an annual overview of key elements within HMRC’s financial statements. This year’s report focuses primarily on HMRC’s compliance work. It sets out HMRC’s performance in four areas: measuring and reporting the impact of compliance work; allocating compliance resources; operating effective revenue systems; and managing fraud, error and debt from the personal tax credits systems. It also provides a progress update on areas of interest from previous years such as the implementation of Real Time Information in collecting PAYE and efforts to improve tax collection.
This year’s NAO audit revealed an error of £1.9 billion HMRC made in June 2011 in the baseline it used to agree targets for the 2010 spending review period. This error meant that HMRC’s targets were set too low and led HMRC to repeatedly, though inadvertently, overstate the improvement in its performance.
This inquiry will investigate why the error was made and what HMRC is doing to improve its governance and reporting of key performance data; examine the allocation of compliance resources and discuss the Department’s financial performance and efforts to reduce tax avoidance.
Relevant information