Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, how many full time equivalent HM Revenue and Customs staff worked on tax compliance activity in each of the last five financial years.

The average full-time equivalents (FTE) in HMRC currently working on tax compliance activity is 17,300:

We are unable to provide the previous years of data as it is not currently available, and therefore this information would only be available at disproportionate cost.

Within Customer Compliance Group staff are deployed across a wide range of compliance risks. Internally, these are usually grouped by customer segment, tax head or specific tax risk being worked.

HMRC publishes information on the amounts spent on compliance by customer segment in our annual report and accounts at Tax by different customer groups – 2022 to 2023 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk). The information for 2023/24 will be available in 2024. HMRC does not release detailed breakdowns of this information for operational reasons.