SAN DIEGO: HMRC’s plan to dissolve its core operations and have them reproduced as standard features of common business software will hollow out one of the largest departments of state and could lead to 80 per cent of 57,000 staff being made redundant.
The unheralded plan, outlined in HM Revenue and Customs “API Strategy” last week, goes further even than the last coalition government imagined in its 2012 Digital Strategy, which proposed automating 80 per cent of government jobs by having software programs do the work instead of people. Government jobs won’t just be automated by government software. They’ll become banal features of common business software. Back-office central government jobs will, with the computer systems they use to do their jobs, become back-end processing in accounting software produced by the likes of Sage.
HMRC’s API Strategy showed how digital privatization would cut HMRC back office work about 80 per cent. It said this would benefit HMRC by reducing its back office costs. But it did not spell out how.
The way digitization would cut costs was spelt out in an aside Cabinet Office wrote into its 2012 Digital Strategy: it would reduce employment costs by about 78 per cent, including the cost of buildings to house them and computer systems to help them do their work.
But the API Strategy was little more than a promotional brochure to introduce business software developers to their new role at the vanguard of the government’s privatization programme.
For the real-world effect of digitization, you have to dig the numbers out of the publications HMRC is required by law to produce for adults.
Its staff levels otherwise stayed roughly unchanged in all other areas. Staff processing benefits and credits declined by 641 between 2011 and 2015. But that processing business tax went up by 538, enforcement and compliance were up by 747 people and in other areas by 457.
Personal tax staff accounted for almost 40 per cent of HMRC’s employment roll in 2011. Their numbers were cut almost two thirds. The API strategy would now automate work done in enforcement and compliance: the other single largest area of employment in HMRC, which with 26,222 people last year accounted for another 46 per cent of all HMRC staff.
