Bungling taxmen get £13m bonus
Officials recieved a drastic increase in bonuses last year despite mistakes that lead to 1.4m people having to repay taxes
Rosie Kinchen Published: 23 January 2011
Tax officials were paid more than £13m in bonuses for good performance last year despite mistakes that led to 1.4m people being asked to repay an average of £1,400 in the run-up to Christmas.
Her Majesty?s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) spent almost £800,000 more on bonuses than they did the previous year. The disclosure comes only weeks after it emerged that another 450,000 people will have to pay an additional £180m in income tax to make up for errors.
Charlotte Linacre, campaign manager at the TaxPayers? Alliance, described the bonuses as ?rewards for failure?. Freedom of information requests revealed that bonuses in many government departments rose during the financial crisis.
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office paid £8.5m in bonuses last year, an increase of £800,000. Nearly 500 additional members of staff were given payments on top of their salaries. The average amount rose from £1,280 to £1,307. More than 100 senior civil servants in the department received £10,000 or more.
The total bonus payments in the Home Office rose from £6.6m to £7.5m last year with two members of staff receiving more than £25,000. Two civil servants at the Ministry of Defence were paid awards worth nearly £50,000.
Priti Patel, the Conservative MP for Witham in Essex said: ?At a time of great pressure on public finances, taxpayers will be appalled to see so much money going on civil service bonuses, especially when some exceed £40,000 on top of large salaries and pensions.?
Figures from the Office for National Statistics showed that the average bonus paid to public sector staff rose from £620 to £743 in
2010 while private sector bonuses fell 3.4%.Linacre said: ?Many private sector workers have taken a pay cut or even been made redundant. Public bodies have continued as if the recession never happened.?
Public sector salaries are subject to a pay freeze from April but civil servants will still receive bonus payments. The coalition government has said that only 25% of the best performing civil servants and NHS managers should be awarded bonuses this year.
An HMRC spokesman said the bonuses were paid as part of contracts signed under the previous administration and would now be curbed.