Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, how many people worked for the Taxpayer Protection Taskforce in each month between April 2021 and December 2022.

At Spring Budget 2021 the Government announced a £100 million investment into the Taxpayer Protection Taskforce of 1,250 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) staff up to March 2023. The taskforce was established to extend HMRC’s work to address fraud and error in the COVID support schemes that they administered (Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, Self-Employment Income Support Scheme, and Eat Out to Help Out). The table below shows the month-by-month breakdown of resources deployed in the taskforce from April 2021 to end of October 2022. HMRC are unable to provide more recent data as this is still being assured.

Table 1: Monthly breakdown of FTE staff deployed to taskforce: