Speeches by Kane.

“I am very supportive of what you are saying about customers who are non-compliant, but some customers who are complying are then seeing an additional burden. Are you getting the balance right, in not overly penalising compliant customers by approaching this in terms of the acceptable burden on those who are not complia…”

“I have one final question, just expanding on that. You are absolutely right that Making Tax Digital was about bringing things into the modern world. It is a journey that started 10 years ago, but it is getting a turbo boost now with digital and AI. We have already covered that. Digital is going to be more all-encompass…”

“I have one final point on that. We are talking about the ease of compliance, the ease of doing business and the way digital can make life easier for HMRC. There is a human element to digital. Not everybody reacts to digital in the same way. There is a psychological approach to it. Some people are very happy in a digita…”

“Perhaps I will leave you with a comment. I almost agree with that. It is also your responsibility at HMRC to help customers to have a good experience. It is heartening to hear that a lot of your businesses are finding the journey acceptable, but we have to make sure we have heard the voices of the marginalised ones. It…”

“It will certainly help trust, if you get that right. That will impact the trust issues that we were talking about earlier.”

“In terms of getting the efficiencies in the system and embracing new technologies, is it the case that the differences in terms of being held to account by the two Parliaments are not causing any issues? Is it the case that you are getting the same efficiencies and that there is no differential between them?”

“Thank you, Chair. It is important that this Committee gets inside of that.”

“It is bringing things together, so thank you for that.”

“I am going to give you a quote from the PAC Report “Progress with making tax digital” from 2023: “HMRC announced in 2015–16 that its flagship digital transformation programme Making Tax Digital, would make it easier for taxpayers to get their tax right, helping to reduce the £9 billion of tax revenue lost each year fro…”

“So just to clarify that, it is broadly the same. You are not seeing anything that causes you concern.”

“I will give you another quote from the PAC Report from 2023. This is continuing from the quote I gave you earlier on. “However, HMRC has lost sight of the need to put customers at the heart of its changes to the tax system. The programme was originally expected to reduce the overall burden on customers but will now imp…”

“I would agree with that. We have made the point that we are in a step change in technology at the moment. An observation I may have is that the technology is changing in a step change approach, but the Government approach is changing in an incremental approach. I wonder whether you think that that is possibly where you…”

“It does, but any of us who have been involved in big change with technology know that it is once you have the thing up and running, and your people have to start interacting with it, that the deficiencies start to become apparent. You may have a reporting mechanism, but how are you going to ensure that everything is be…”

“The Report says: “Government does not know the overall picture for how much is spent on digital change programmes”. The data might exist, but you do not have it in a form or place where you can use it appropriately. What is happening there? If the data exists, you do not have access to it.”

“Following on from that, paragraph 1.3 of the NAO Report says: “Government lacks basic data on how much is being spent.” How much is that data deficiency down to a lack of resources? I am going to address these questions to Andrew and Clare. How much is that data deficiency caused by the imbalance in resources to which …”

“How do you help Departments to provide the information? Giving them the playbook is one thing, but I think you pointed out that all of us are on a different journey when it comes to interacting with digital. Sometimes, if you are at a particular point in your career, interacting with digital can be a slower process tha…”

“The language that we use is incredibly important. We talk about this as having a thread of digital, as you said there, through the programme. We talk about digital natives and digital migrants. Most of us here are of the age where we grew up in the analogue world and have moved to the digital world. We expressed that m…”

“You know what it looks like, but do you know how to get there?”

“Could I just clarify a point that Lloyd raised? You talked about how you need to become a modern and sophisticated buyer of cloud. Do you know what that looks like? Do you have a sense of what it is and how you are going to get there?”

“Do you have a timescale for this? Can you talk a little bit about the timescale for delivering the strategy and sorting out the data deficiencies that currently exist?”