Certainly. You are right that paragraph 41 refers to the Scottish rate of income tax, so the point does not relate to Revenue Scotland, ROS or SEPA, but we can say something about it if that would be helpful.
There are two elements to Revenue Scotland’s staffing. There is the programme team, which has been working on the set-up of all the elements—the processes, the information technology, the technical guidance and the communications. We are now developing the operational team, which will run all this live.
The delays that the Auditor General highlighted, and the point about the resourcing plan at paragraph 16, relate to the programme team and the set-up. The Auditor General argues that we should have had more staff earlier in the set-up. With hindsight, I think that that would have been helpful, but I do not accept that it was “required”, which was the Auditor General’s language in a headline. If we had had more people in place sooner—very slightly sooner; perhaps a couple of months sooner—that would have made things go more smoothly, but it would not have materially changed the position that we are in today.
The operational staffing position has moved on significantly since the Auditor General’s staff carried out their work in October. The First Minister updated Parliament on the matter last week, but I can give the committee more up-to-date figures, as of yesterday. Of the 40 operational staff, 21 have been recruited, and eight posts are going through the recruitment process. Three posts have interviews scheduled, and five are at a slightly earlier stage. That will leave us with 11 posts, which we will advertise as planned in January.
We do not need absolutely all 40 people in place to go live on 1 April 2015, but we are very confident that we will have all the staff that we need for that date, and we are aiming to have all 40 in place.