Government Tax Profession

Senior Tory says Treasury should take the lead on official stats as Cabinet Office and UK Statistics Authority "have been asleep at the wheel"

New appointments in the civil service, UK politics, and public affairs, via our colleagues on Dods People

"There are always ways to make government better, always ways to make sure that the taxes of people are better spent," says chancellor, against gloomy global economic backdrop

Pacac says government spends “considerable amounts of money” producing accounts even thought it "not clear that they are of any use to select committees, or to the public"

Cabinet office minister Matt Hancock says the ONS - which moved out of London in the mid-2000s - will stay in Newport to to act as a "big data hub" in the region

793-page investigation into response to Savile's serial offending cites warnings from former cabinet secretary Lord Butler over plans to award TV and radio star a knighthood

£23.2m contract to develop a new generation of GPS tags scrapped because it has proved “too challenging”. The MoJ tells CSW it still expects to see benefits of spending to date on the deal

Sharing of staff and ideas between Holyrood and Westminster still hindered by "a bit of a perception" it will require upheaval for civil servants, says Scotland's top official - as she stresses "need to recognise each others’ evolving roles"

Thompson to succeed Lin Homer as chief executive, while tax specialist Edward Troup to chair the board's executive committee

Public Accounts Committee criticises lack of transparency over HM Revenue and Customs' £130m, ten-year tax deal with Google – but says department has taken "a step in the right direction" in pledging reform of penalty regime

Peter Wilkinson, director of rail passenger services at the DfT, comes under fire after reportedly telling commuters they had "got to break" industrial action over changes to train drivers' terms

Pilling – who served at the Prison Service, Department of Health, and in the top job at the NIO – has been drafted in to check up on the post-Leveson press regulator set up by industry

Overall block grant will be at least as high as it would have been under the Barnett Formula – while Scottish government gets extra borrowing powers

MPs say closure of BIS Sheffield will result in "loss of vital expertise, shrink the civil service talent pool and reduce the variety of experiences that contribute to policy-making"

After better-than-expected Spending Review settlement, Foreign Office perm sec says new review to make FCO "more flexible" will not be ignored

National Audit Office report says Cabinet Office's Fraud, Error and Debt team is "growing into a centre of expertise" – but warns departmental data is "often variable and not sufficient" to keep tabs on the true scale of public sector fraud

New report by the public spending watchdog finds "major concerns about how accountability of taxpayers' money is exercised"

New appointments in the civil service, UK politics, and public affairs, via our colleagues on Dods People

Powerful Economic and Domestic Secretariat to get a new deputy director to help departments focus on longer-term trends and the impact of technology

Treasury committee says 2014 intervention by then-chief secretary Danny Alexander “gives the appearance of a minister trying to lean on the OBR”

"I think we continued to do the ‘to departments’ [approach] for perhaps a little longer than we could or should have," GDS boss says

Former Border Force head Tony Smith sets out scale of the challenge Brexit would pose to management of Britain's borders

IfG's deputy director Julian McCrae says long-awaited new plans are "little more than a laundry list of nice to haves"

Ministers say new, single documents bringing together spending totals and broad reform plans will "enable the public to see how government is delivering"