Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government further to the Written Answer by Lord O’Neill of Gatley on 12 May (HL8031), how many times in (1) 2014, and (2) 2015, HM Revenue and Customs' (HMRC) specialist embassy team carried out risk assessment activities and identified individuals who had not notified their employment to HMRC, and subsequently took action to ensure they paid the tax that was due.

The Embassy team in 2014 and 2015 didn’t undertake any specific risk assessment activities with regards to individuals who had not notified their employment. However the team arranged for one of our Central Compliance Teams to undertake a project to review the National Insurance Contributions (NICs) position of various embassies employees using our Risk Profiling system. We reviewed 697 cases and opened checks into 258 of these. Of these 150 were found to be compliant. The checks covered the tax years 2009/10 to 2014/15.

In the current year we are expecting to open further checks in relation to both tax and NICs on a number of employees.