Examination of Witnesses(Questions 1-19)
SIR NICHOLAS
MONTAGU KCB, MR
DAVID HARTNETT
AND MR
STEPHEN BANYARD
MONDAY 20 MAY 2002
Chairman
1. Order, order. Welcome to the Committee of
Public Accounts and welcome once again Sir Nicholas. It is always
a delight to have you with us.
(Sir Nicholas Montagu) It is always our pleasure to
be here.
2. Today we are examining the Comptroller and
Auditor General's report attached to the Inland Revenue's Appropriation
Accounts for 2000-01. You have been kind enough to send us a supplementary
note. Thank you very much. Would you please introduce your colleagues?
(Sir Nicholas Montagu) To my left is Dave Hartnett,
who is a member of my Board and Director General (Policy and Technical).
On my right is Stephen Banyard, who is Director of Local Services.
3. You have been kind enough to give us this
supplementary note and you have told us that you have had to learn
a lot in a very short time and you have been very honest with
us in saying that perhaps you have not made as much progress as
you might have hoped for and perhaps my first question can refer
to that. If you turn to page R16, paragraph 3.28 and read that
you will see that "... when end of year returns are analysed
the Department will be unable to reconcile payments made by employers
to those authorised". When you answer this question you might
just fill members in a bit on what this actually means. I had
this explained to me kindly by the Comptroller and Auditor General
but that clearly is a bit of a problem. As well as explaining
this to me, can you also tell me why you have tolerated such a
major weakness in your systems and when the situation will be
resolved?
(Sir Nicholas Montagu) I am not sure that the situation
will as such be resolved, nor is it a weakness in our systems.
The point is this. The structure of the tax credit system is such
that we authorise employers to pay tax credits at a daily rate
from a certain date. Depending on whether employers pay salaries
weekly or monthly, on that also will depend when the first payment
occurs. What this means effectively is that payments which were
authorised for a particular tax year may actually be paid with
salaries in the following year. If that happens, then that payment
will appear on the employer's return, which we call the P35, for
the following year. So a direct year on year reconciliation is
not possible. What we have been trying to do is to arrive at a
system, working with the National Audit Office, which gives us
a sound basis for an estimate and the Comptroller and Auditor
General has said in his report that he is satisfied that this
gives us a satisfactory way of reconciling and of estimating.
4. Could you explain for the benefit of members
the difference between P11 and P35?
(Sir Nicholas Montagu) The P11 is an individual tax
document relating to an individual employee. The P35 is the schedule
that the employer submits to us at the end of the year listing
all the employees with the tax and national insurance deducted,
and also tax credit payments. The sum of the individual documents
is actually more the P14s, which are the individual end of year
documents for each employee which accompany this.
5. Is it right that you have difficulty in tying
up P35s with what the Revenue have authorised? Is that the problem?
(Sir Nicholas Montagu) A direct tie-up; yes.
6. You claim this is not a real problem. You
can live with this.
(Sir Nicholas Montagu) We can live with it provided
that we keep a tight control on ways in which we do check up on
authorisation and provided that we can work with the Comptroller
and Auditor General so as still to have a system which gives us
what Sir John regards as a sound estimate. There are certain circumstances
in which we would always be able to check directly, as for example
where we put the employer in funds in order to enable him to pay
out tax credits.
7. You say you are quite relaxed about it, but
does this really tie in with the assurances you were giving to
the Committee or are you denying that you did assure the Committee
that you could reconcile these two factors?
(Sir Nicholas Montagu) I think what I am saying is
that I am not relaxed about it, but given what is essentially
an issue of periodicity, in other words the way in which tax credits
are administered according to legislation and the way in which
the end of year documentation works, there is an intrinsic difficulty
in getting that straight tie-up. What I am not relaxed about at
all, as I said in my letter to you, is the state of the checks
that we made on levels of error. Our checks after the National
Audit Office report and Sir John's conclusions did not reveal
any serious systemic problem.
8. We can always come back to that later if
we need to. Could you look at paragraph 3.27? It says there that
you do not have detailed data about compliance visits to employers,
which I find somewhat surprising. Perhaps you could explain that.
You cannot therefore estimate the extent of errors in tax credits
made by employers. How can you satisfy yourself therefore about
the accuracy of tax credits in general?
(Sir Nicholas Montagu) When we visit employers, if
we find something wrong, then there are 74 different possible
errors against which we will record what is wrong. I think I am
right in saying that incorrectly paid tax credits would be one
of those.
(Mr Banyard) Indeed.
(Sir Nicholas Montagu) What Sir John was concerned
about was more the detailed routine reporting of employer compliance
visits. In line with the National Audit Office recommendations
we have expanded our manual records so that we can enable more
detailed analysis in the year and at the year end; and we shall
now analyse annually details from all reviews so that we get a
better feeling for trends and for behaviours. Of course the fact
that an employer is paying tax credits is itself one of the indicators
which our compliance teams would use in deciding to make a visit.
Also, in the case of the 6,800 employer compliance visits made
to employers who paid tax credits, payments in excess of what
should have been made were found only in 18 cases. What I am saying
is that I take, as I think Sir John takes, some comfort from what
we have found. I absolutely accept his recommendation that we
need more in the way of routine data and we are moving to give
effect to his recommendation.
9. Do I understand your answer correctly? Are
you saying that despite the deficiencies in the information you
are getting from these visits you can still measure whether you
are targeting your compliance teams to the best effect? That is
what you are saying to us, is it?
(Sir Nicholas Montagu) What I am saying to you is
this. Where something is wrong on a visit, we record it already;
that includes tax credit payments. That, along with a whole raft
of other things, will give us a feel for whether we are targeting
the right employers.
10. I am still rather worried about this. Have
you seen a letter which was written by Dawn Primarolo to my predecessor,
David Davis, dated 23 July 1999?
(Sir Nicholas Montagu) I am sorry, if I have seen
it, I certainly do not have it with me.
11. We will let you have a look at that letter.
Basically what my predecessor was asking for was direct access
on behalf of the National Audit Office. What the Minister was
saying was, "I would have thought it reasonable for you to
audit tax credit arrangements by looking at the Inland Revenue's
records. If this causes you major difficulty in practice we can
clearly reconsider, but I am certainly not at present disposed
to impose further burdens on employers". I hope I am not
taking the National Audit Office in vain, but in view of what
I have been asking you, they might well be worried that you are
not entirely living up to the assurances you made to the Committee
and that we may ask you to look at this again and give the National
Audit Office direct access.
(Sir Nicholas Montagu) Of course if the Committee
asks me to do that I shall be happy to do it. If I may say so,
the position that the Minister set out is still relevant. It remains
a major concern of the Government and the Inland Revenue to keep
burdens on employers, particularly small employers, to a minimum.
I am afraid that it is true that such employers would regard any
additional government visitors—and I fear they would not
be sufficiently sophisticated to distinguish the majesty of the
National Audit Office from the mundane of the Inland Revenue—as
a burden. What I should like to do, in the light of what I have
said about accepting Sir John's recommendation and in the light
of what Sir John has said about accepting the basis of our estimate,
is to talk further with him about how best to provide the Comptroller
and Auditor General with the assurance that he requires but without
imposing a further burden on small employers.
12. We are very concerned about burdens on small
businesses but our primary duty is to insist that Parliament has
proper oversight of what is a very important area. Am I right
in saying, to sum this up, that tax credits are another way of
delivering social security benefits? Sir John and his team have
full oversight of the Department for Work and Pensions in their
work, but because of the way the Minister has replied to my predecessor,
there is a lacuna in the way that Parliament can see tax credits.
(Sir Nicholas Montagu) I am not sure I would actually
agree with that.
13. I did not think you would.
(Sir Nicholas Montagu) It was a complex question.
You asked whether I would accept that tax credits are social security
benefits. The answer has to be no. If you listen to the Chancellor's
dicta on the subject, it is true that the working families' tax
credit replaced family credit, but what Mr Brown is saying is
that this is something very different, this is part of a system
linked closely to the tax system and linked to work to further
his employment incentives again. I think I must qualify your assumption
on that. So far as the assurances are concerned, I would hope
to be able to satisfy you that we either have or are going to
have the necessary arrangements in place. If I might make one
further point—and forgive a long answer, but I think it
is very important for context—the transferred responsibility
for tax credits to the Inland Revenue is probably the biggest
change ever to hit us. We have, I think rightly, devoted our attention
to making sure that the credits reach the people at whom they
are aimed. At the same time we have been seeking to refine our
compliance regime, and this includes applying the kind of risk
analysis that the Department for Work and Pensions—then
the Department for Social Security—did not. I hope that
I can satisfy the Committee that the Inland Revenue is taking
extremely seriously its duty to ensure compliance, alongside its
duty to ensure maximum take-up by people entitled to the credit.
14. You are certainly forgiven for a long answer.
This is a very important area. Tax credits are going to become
more and more important: child benefit is going to become a tax
credit also. So that is why you will forgive me for taking an
interest in this whole area.
(Sir Nicholas Montagu) Of course. May I just say that
as new tax credits come in an awful lot of what Sir John covers
in his report here will become automatic, things like risk analysis.
They will be built into the new tax credit system, which is something
of the order of five times the size of the system required for
self-assessment. It is a very, very big project.
15. Please turn now to page 20 and look at Figure
9. You will see that you still failed to meet your targets for
clearing records despite devoting additional resources and that
you have been trying to reduce the number of tax cases requiring
clerical intervention. Would you like to comment on that. Is that
a problem?
(Sir Nicholas Montagu) Yes. It is a problem in the
sense that I cannot report to the Committee the progress which
I hoped to when I appeared before you previously. The news is
not all bad and it is certainly mitigable. We cleared more open
cases—the Committee will be familiar with that term of art—last
year than in the previous year. We still do have a very large
number outstanding for a variety of reasons. We gave priority
last year, and I think rightly, to meeting what I might call day
to day customer service targets, and we did so despite some of
these—for example the time for post turnaround—being
more stringent than in the previous year. At the same time we
were undergoing major structural change in Stephen's part of the
organisation, moving from 500-plus local offices to 65-plus areas.
I think I may say that it is a great tribute to Stephen and his
people that they achieved that level of customer service. What
it did mean was that we still have more open cases at the moment
than I had hoped. We have set up machinery specifically to tackle
this and we really do want to get through it.
16. Lastly I want to refer you to page R19,
paragraph 4.5. At the bottom of that paragraph you will see, "On
the basis of the responses received to date the Department estimate
that underpaid tax totals £2 million and overpaid tax £15.1
million". Obviously this Committee has taken an interest
in this subject in the past. You have sent out letters to your
clients seeking their advice. What I should like to know is how
many individuals actually responded to the letters you sent out?
(Sir Nicholas Montagu) From recollection, something
of the order of 160,000.
17. Can you break it down at all between underpayments
and overpayments or in any other way?
(Sir Nicholas Montagu) Yes, I can indeed. We received
160,000 responses and we have made over 14,000 repayments and
calculated 1,600 underpayments.
18. Do you think you are treating the public
entirely fairly in this matter? Your systems do seem to be deficient
in some respects. You are having to write to them again, some
respond, some do not respond, indeed why should they have to respond?
Should you not try to get things right in the first place?
(Sir Nicholas Montagu) It is not always a question
of us getting it right in the first place. The important point
to make here is that open cases are entirely normal. We have a
load every year and they arise either when the correct amount
of tax has not been paid or where we cannot tell whether it has,
for example because the employer has used the wrong national insurance
number. We try to correct matters, we try to track down the employees,
but there is always a limit to what we can do. The particular
problem which I discussed with the Committee previously arose
for reasons with which you are familiar in 1997-98, and that has
a knock-on effect. It is not fair to say that the number of open
cases reflects deficiencies in our records. The other point I
should make is this. In 85 per cent of the responses we had, the
tax paid was actually right. Most of these open cases have not
paid too much or too little. It was simply that, for the kinds
of reasons I mentioned, we had no way of knowing. The other point
I should make is that these are not closed cases; they remain
open. If we get other information, through employers, through
the individuals or whatever, which enables us to get the record
straight, we do so.
Mr Rendel
19. I should like to start on income tax self-assessment
which is probably the most important part of the collection of
income tax nowadays as far as you are concerned; although not
as big as what you get through PAYE, undoubtedly more complex.
We had a meeting about this on 22 October at which there was a
lot of confusion about how the penalties work. But as a result
of one of your notes since then, we have now clarified that. Have
all those who failed to get their forms in on time at the end
of January this year now been sent their penalty notices?
(Sir Nicholas Montagu) Yes, they should have been.
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