HMRC has been making information on our performance available for many years through our Annual Report and Autumn Performance Report. We now want to build on that and make transparency a key principle of how we run the department. HMRC’s draft business plan for 2011-15 sets out our transparency commitments. For the future, we are committed to publishing information about our performance against our objectives, including those in the HMRC charter. We plan to publish a wide variety of information, including 14 performance indicators. Information about the running of the department can and should be made available and much of the customer data we hold can be anonymised and cleansed so that data sets can be made available without identifying anyone.
HMRC has been making information on our performance available for many years through our Annual Report and Autumn Performance report. We regularly consult on policy proposals and have answered many thousands of requests under the Freedom of Information Act since it was passed in 2000. All of this puts information into the public domain about how we carry out our role in making the money available to fund public services and helping families and individuals with targeted financial support. We now want to build on that and make transparency a key principle of how we run the department. That means moving from providing the information we think the public would be interested in, or that they request, to an assumption that we will make information available in all cases unless there is a good reason not to.
Of course, much of the information held by HMRC is personal information about the individuals, businesses and other legal bodies who pay tax and claim tax credits. There would never be any question of making information public that identifies any of our customers. Customer information is legally protected by the Commissioners of Revenue and Customs Act and by the Data Protection Act and HMRC’s Purpose Vision and Way recognises that we have privileged access to information and commits us to protecting it.
But there is no contradiction in HMRC’s twin commitments to the confidentiality of customer information and to greater transparency. Information about the running of the department can and should be made available and much of the customer data we hold can be anonymised and cleansed so that data sets can be made available without identifying anyone. We are confident we can do this in a way that does not inhibit our ability to perform our functions or and without helping those who seek to pervert the tax system. On the contrary, greater transparency should enable a wider range of knowledgeable people to contribute their thinking and perspective to how we do things.
HMRC’s draft business plan for 2011-15, published on 8 November 2010 at www.hmrc.gov.uk/about/bus-plan-2011-15.pdf, sets out our transparency commitments. Some of these have already been delivered and readers may well have spent time browsing through the information we published on:
For the future, we are committed to publishing information about our performance against our objectives, including those in the HMRC Charter. Rather than working to particular targets, publishing this information will enable the public to form a view on our performance including the decisions we take on how to balance our goals of maximising tax yield, improving customer service and making sustainable reduction in our cost base.
We plan to publish a wide variety of information, including 14 performance indicators. Our performance indicators will measure both our inputs, and impacts. The input indicators are unit costs of collecting taxes and administering tax credits and benefits for the most important areas. The impact indicators are more varied and cover customer service, our compliance activity (tax gap, cash collected from compliance activity, revenue protection from changes to legislation and other activities) and debt management. More information is available on our website: www.hmrc.gov.uk/about/bus-plan-2011-15.pdf
HMRC already uses customer and other information we have to produce around 100 National and Official Statistics releases a year which put information in the public domain without ever identifying anyone. National Statistics are a subset of the Official Statistics produced by HMRC which have been assessed by the UK Statistics Authority as compliant with its Code of Practice. Our releases cover a wide range of topics such as:
These statistics and more can be found on the HMRC internet site at www.hmrc.gov.uk/thelibrary/national-statistics.htm.
Official statistics are produced by HMRC’s teams of analysts in both the Knowledge, Analysis & Information Directorate and the Trade Statistics unit in Excise, Customs, Stamps and Money Directorate. As part of our commitment to the Official Statistics Code of Practice, we regularly engage with users to ensure the current releases are the best that can be produced. We also look for opportunities to release innovative statistics from new or developing policy areas.
Some research for HMRC is carried out by external suppliers under carefully controlled conditions. This allows us to use approaches that we could not resource from our own team, for example using field forces to conduct interviews. It is also particularly helpful where, even in an anonymised study, members of the public might be reluctant to give an honest answer about tax or tax credit matters to an HMRC official. All external research papers are published on the HMRC website at www.hmrc.gov.uk/research/reports.htm. Recent examples of published papers include:
We have to prioritise how we use the time of our experts and there are always more questions we would like to answer and even using external research providers we cannot always answer all the questions we would like to. We have therefore explored the scope for making anonymised data available in a secure environment where it can be accessed by professional analysts and researchers from outside HMRC. We have developed a secure data lab and piloted this approach with the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation. We aim to open the data lab in due course.
All these initiatives will increase the amount of information about HMRC that is put in the public domain but it is for the public to decide what information they want and how they want to use it. That will take time and part of our commitment to transparency includes a promise to keep our plans under review and respond to the feedback we receive. As a start we are running an informal consultation on the transparency section of the draft HMRC Business Plan. We are seeking views from our stakeholder and customer groups, and have set up an internet page and email address for individuals and businesses to submit feedback. More information can be found at www.hmrc.gov.uk/transparency/consultation.htm. The consultation will run until the end of January 2011.
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Dave Hartnett is Permanent Secretary for Tax in HM Revenue & Customs
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