HM Revenue & Customs 'Trust Statement'

If you are trawling the Interweb, trying to find out how much is paid out in Tax Credits, Child Benefit and Child Trust Fund in the UK, you'll no longer find it with most other welfare payment in the DWP's good old Table 3. That's because they are now administered by HM Revenue & Customs. And can you find the statistics on their website? Nope, the stuff available here is just drivel about 'meeting performance targets'.

I happened to remember that the last time I found these statistics, they were buried away in HMRC's Annual Report at the back in the 'Trust Statement'. If you google that phrase, you discover, rather unsurprisingly, that the National Audit Office has expressed reservations about the accounting for Tax Credits for the fourth .. no ... fifth consecutive year.

Then you finally track down HMRC's 2006-07 Annual Report & Trust Statement, not, as you might expect on the normal HMRC website, not even on a 'gov.uk' website, but in the 'eu' domain, and to throw people off the scent even further, they transposed the URL from 'hmrc' to 'hmcr', so it ends up as "www.hmcr.eu/about/hmrc-06-07-acc.pdf".

And they've shifted Child Benefit payments into the 'Operating Cost Statement', heck knows why...