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Comment by Reason077 | Hacker News Reader

It's staggering to me that £46 billion goes to HM Revenue and Customs. So it costs £46 billion to administer £506 billion in tax revenue! That's almost 1/3 the budget of the entire NHS!

That doesn't seem like a good ROI at all. A product of an over-complicated tax system?

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If you go back a year you can get some detail into what HM Revenue and Customs spends it's money on (90% of it is under the title 'social protection' which is child welfare and tax credits). The collection and enforcement looks like it costs 4 billion at most.

Tax credits deserve some scrutiny. A significant portion of tax revenue is effectively being paid as a subsidy to businesses allowing them to systematically underpay their staff.

I'm not sure what this number represents, assuming it is correct, but it is certainly not how much it costs to run HMRC.

"It cost £4 billion to run HMRC in 2018-19" [1] (page 18)

[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

That may include tax credits, don't assume it is just "administration" costs.

Yes, HMRC has 56,000 employees, so it's unlikely that's all or indeed mostly administrative costs.

That data looks incorrect. According to this, the HMRC budget is 4 billion.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/hmrc-annual-repor...

Which also matches the 4 billion that the HMRC wikipedia page links to

https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130127142016/ht...

I don't know what their actual budget looks like, but I do know that they're huge and have been making significant changes around digital transformation. That would result in high spending followed by later savings.