Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what estimate he has made of the return on investment for each full time equivalent tax compliance officer in each of the last five years.

For HMRC, the return on investment of our compliance work goes beyond generating yield, and also includes mitigating harm, ensuring a level playing field for those who pay their taxes correctly, and deterring non-compliance from taking place.

Furthermore, understanding the exact value of our compliance work in a given year is complicated by:

• the natural variability in the work HMRC compliance undertakes including differences in the tax heads, and types of risk compliance officers can be deployed against;
• the difficulty in calculating marginal return from additional resources;
• the productivity and training lags for new starters versus experienced officers, with compliance officers taking up to 5 years of training and experience before being fully productive;
• and timing differences between when work is done, and the resulting yield is scored.