Treasury committee hearing on the work of HMRC

The House of Commons’ Treasury committee recently met to hear about the work of HMRC (tinyurl.com/hoctcfeb). It wasted no time with niceties other than to invite the witnesses – Jim Harra HMRC chief executive; Penny Ciniewicz director general for customer compliance in HMRC; and Angela MacDonald deputy chief executive – to introduce themselves but launched into questions on fraud and error rates in the Covid-19 support schemes.

Chair of the committee Mel Stride noted the total error and fraud across the measures – coronavirus job retention scheme (CJRS) self-employed income support scheme and eat-out-to-help-out – was likely to be about £6bn. Given that HMRC initially suggested it would recover £1 in every £4 of that the overall net loss would be about £4.3bn.

Mr Harra updated the chair on this point saying this was more likely to be in the region of...