§ Mr. Lawrenceasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer what has been the total cost to date of the operation of the 715 tax certificate procedure; how many more civil servants have been employed to deal with it; and what has been the amount of tax recovered thereby.
§ Mr. Robert Sheldon,pursuant to his reply [Official Report, 13th July 1978; Vol. 953, c. 794], gave the following information:
I assume the hon. Member is referring to the arrangements which came into force in April 1977.
The estimated total cost of the new scheme for the three years ended 5th April 1978, was approximately £7.2 million. Apart from the transitional period when work was being done on both schemes, there were no extra staff employed to deal with the new arrangements. On the contrary, these will result in a considerable staff saving compared with the old scheme.
It is not possible to quantify the additional tax paid by the construction industry as a result of the new scheme. However, it is clear that it has brought 978W penditure from the other institutions' budgets, most of which is for administration, was as follows:
about a substantial reduction in the loss of tax through evasion. For example, in each of the years 1974–75 and 1975–76, payments to subcontractors of approximately £25 million are known to have been made incorrectly without deduction of tax as a result of fraud and misuse of documents. The comparable figure for 1977–78 is not expected to exceed £1 million.