Customs and IR merger Bill published

The Paymaster General, Dawn Primarolo, has published the Bill to merge Customs and Inland Revenue and promised 'improved customer service for businesses and individual tax payers'. It also paves the way for a new prosecutions office.

The new department, known as HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) will merge Inland Revenue and HM Customs & Excise into the new single department, created as a result of the O'Donnell review of revenue administration, published alongside Budget 2004.

Benefits

The Treasury says that the new department will bring significant benefits including:

• delivering improvements for customers, through more effective, joined-up services;
  
• improving fairness by making better use of information across HMRC which will help target compliance activities, thereby reducing the burden on honest taxpayers; and cracking down on those trying to abuse the system; and
  
• delivering efficiency improvements, with integration contributing 3,000 posts towards total savings in HMRC of 16,000 posts by the end of 2007/08, as set out in the Spending Review earlier this year.

Prosecutions office

The Bill also creates a new independent prosecutions office - the Revenue and Customs Prosecutions Office (RCPO) - to prosecute HMRC cases in England and Wales, implementing a key recommendation of the Butterfield Review. It claims the creation of RCPO will:

• demonstrate the full independence of the prosecutors and ensure that the public can have confidence in their credibility and integrity.
  
• introduce external scrutiny of criminal investigation work,
  
• improve standards and effectiveness; and
  
• make the staff of the office, through the Director, accountable to the Attorney General.

Introducing the Bill, the Paymaster General Dawn Primarolo said: "We are committed to ensuring that our tax administration is best placed to deliver the best possible service to taxpayers. The establishment of HMRC, integrating the work of Customs and the Revenue, represents a major contribution to the Government's public service reform agenda, aimed at delivering real service improvements for people and businesses throughout Britain."

The Attorney General Lord Goldsmith said: "Public confidence in the criminal justice system is crucial. The establishment of RCPO, responsible for the prosecution of all Revenue and Customs cases in England and Wales and accountable to me, is an important step to ensure there is an effective and fully independent prosecuting authority dealing with many of the most difficult and complex cases in the criminal justice system."