Chamber and committees

Okay—thank you. I am conscious of the time.

We have mentioned in passing the impact of the pandemic. Willie Coffey has a series of questions to ask on that.

Finally, do you have a timeframe for when you expect your discussions and negotiations on the service level agreement to be concluded?

You think that they will be concluded by September.

Thank you for that illuminating response, which was helpful and will inform our future evidence-taking sessions with the principal people from the college.

I know that Graham Simpson is anxious to come in, but before I call him, I want to ask about ownership of the governance improvement plan, which you have identified as an issue in the report, and particularly the role of the Lanarkshire board and the Scottish Funding Council. What is your understanding of the role that those bodies will play in monitoring the progress of implementation of the governance improvement plan that has been agreed?

That raises wider policy implications that are not necessarily for us to pick up but which are of interest to us as MSPs.

My final question relates to paragraph 24, which talks about “additional costs” incurred by the college in its attempts to understand the situation and to plan for improvements to the governance structure. Do you expect further additional costs to arise as a result of the improvement plan that has been agreed to?

I understand that you are compliant with the requirements that are placed on you by legislation but, as the director general of the Scottish exchequer, would it not make sense for you to at least take into account the National Audit Office’s estimates of future tax take?

Does that include the NAO’s estimate?

Thanks, Mr Simpson. I appreciate that pointer.

I thank all the members who have participated in this evidence session. I also thank the witnesses—the Auditor General, Rebecca Seidel and Lucy Nutley. Thank you very much for your co-operation and openness about the section 22 audit report that you have been required to produce. We will consider our next steps in relation to pursuing our interest in what, by all accounts—including appendix 1 of the report—looks very much like a public institution that has been in crisis.

I now suspend the meeting to allow a changeover of witnesses to take place.

Agenda item 3 is on the administration of Scottish income tax. We took evidence on 3 February on the reports that we had received from Audit Scotland and the National Audit Office. We want to explore further some of the implications of the reports, and we have a series of questions on them.

I welcome our witnesses. Alyson Stafford is director general of the Scottish exchequer, Fiona Thom is head of the income tax and reserved taxes unit at the Scottish Government, Jonathan Athow is director general for customer strategy and tax design at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, and Jackie McGeehan is deputy director for income tax policy at HMRC. You are all very welcome.

I invite Alyson Stafford to make a short opening statement. We will then proceed to ask a series of questions.

Thank you very much, indeed, Auditor General. I also thank you for reminding us that active investigations are still taking place, which might make for some limitation in relation to the areas that we can probe into this morning. However, there is still an awful lot in the published report that we will seek further evidence on in the next hour or so.

The deputy convener of the committee, Sharon Dowey, will open up the questions.