PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
Taxpayer Protection Taskforce (28 January 2022)

At Spring Budget 2021, the Government announced a £100 million investment into a Taxpayer Protection Taskforce to significantly extend HMRC’s work to tackle fraud and error in the COVID support schemes that HMRC administered (Self Employment Income Support Scheme, Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme and Eat Out to Help Out). The HMRC Taxpayer Protection Taskforce does not deliver compliance activity across the COVID support loans to businesses administered outside HMRC.

The taskforce will allow HMRC to undertake at least 30,000 compliance checks in total across three years, up to 2022-23. They are expected to recover around £800 million-£1 billion over two years, in addition to the £536 million recovered during 2020-21.

For COVID-19 schemes, compliance checks are carried out when HMRC suspects there has been an overpayment of the claim, which may be due to either error or fraud. So far, HMRC has opened over 27,000 compliance checks into claims.

This work is still ongoing. HMRC expects the compliance activity and results of the taskforce during 2021-22 to be published in its next Annual Report and Accounts which are expected in Spring 2022.