Government Social Research
HMRC’s core purpose is to administer the UK’s tax and customs systems with the aim of ensuring society’s financial well being.
In delivering our core purpose, HMRC is responsible, under the overall direction of Treasury Ministers, for the efficient administration of direct taxes plus Tax Credits, Child Benefit, National Insurance Contributions and Stamp Duties together with the collection of Student Loans and National Minimum Wage enforcement.
In recent years HMRC has been expanding its capacity to provide strategic analysis, which is supported by research, for the tax system.
A significant aspect of this expansion has been the establishment and growth of a social research team. Social research is conducted to inform and evaluate policy decisions as well as to support the day-to-day business of the Department and to tell us about attitudes to HMRC and to paying tax.
The social research team is constantly developing and currently there are six branches of social researchers who each specialise in a different policy or operational orientated area. Each branch is headed by a Principal Research Officer and supported by either one or two Senior Research Officers or Research Officers. We work closely with other analysts, including economists and statisticians and two of the branches are co-located with them.
Most of the social research includes consultation with members from the population of interest and this may be in the form of surveys to provide statistical information or qualitative studies which invite detailed responses providing a deeper understanding of key issues.
Most of our research is competitively tendered externally and to agreed guidelines, although we do carry out some in-house data analysis and literature reviews. The role of the social researcher in this situation is to ensure the needs of Policy and Operational colleagues are met by the research and to translate research findings so that they are clear for our colleagues, which will enable them to make the best use of them.
The team also advises colleagues on methodological and sampling designs for research and assists in the analysis and presentation of data.
A biannual research programme has been established which is closely tied to Ministers