Chamber and committees

Thank you, and good morning.

I am sorry to bang on about stuff that has been partially discussed already, but I have a big concern about the uncertainties of the tax revenue and the way that it is calculated.

In 2021, I took down a list of all the anomalies in the NAO report for 2020-21, in which there were estimates, guesstimates, apportionments and goodness knows what else. I did the same for 2021-22, and it is almost a carbon copy. We have your report for 2022-23 and, although I have not gone to the trouble of taking out line by line, it is pretty much the same again. As you said, Mr Davies, there have only been some marginal improvements. Is HMRC in breach of the service level agreement that it has in place with the Scottish Government?

Again, if we look at this literally, the SLA says that

“HMRC will identify the Scottish taxpayer population”,

and it also says that it

“will identify and maintain an accurate and robust record of the SIT taxpayer population”.

You cannot say that it is doing that.

There does not seem to be a lot of wriggle room here. The SLA says that HMRC is

“to provide the Scottish Government with sufficient relevant and timely information and data for assurance purposes and to budget effectively”.

Can you categorically say that it does?

Given that it is an agreement between the Scottish Government and HMRC, would you not have a role from the point of view of looking at what the Scottish Government is getting?

As a layman, I would still say that the service level agreement is being breached.

I will move on to something different, although we touched on it when we talked about Scottish income tax behaviour. Auditor General, is there enough published data and research on taxpayer behaviour to assist the forecasting by the SFC, policy development by the Scottish Government and scrutiny by the Scottish Parliament?

As you say, it will be a couple of years before we really understand the full impact of what is happening now.

Okay. I will move on. Do Audit Scotland and the C and AG believe that the strategic picture of risk could be more bespoke for Scotland? We keep coming across places where data is not available for Scotland as such, and there is also apportionment from UK-wide figures. To be honest, the UK has a different make-up of taxpayer. It is all distorted by London. That goes for any place outside London because it dominates, and any apportionment will be somewhat distorted. Can we do this better? Can we get better figures for Scotland?

You will monitor that going forward.

Okay—thank you.

As I said, I am not a lawyer, but, as I go down the list, the clauses seem to be very simple and straightforward and, from your report, it is quite clear that the HMRC is not complying with the SLA. It is okay to say that, in a couple of years’ time, we will have a real figure, but that does not say that it is timely or relevant information or that it is received by the Scottish Government in such a way and such a speed to enable it to discharge its duties in respect of rate setting, forecasting for SIT and all those other things. It is a fairly solid SLA, but it is not being complied with.