Policy & Resources has rejected suggestions it relied too heavily on consultants when drawing up tax reform options, saying over 1,000 officer hours were spent analysing the issue in the previous term.
It comes after Deputy David Goy, who has repeatedly questioned the States’ use of consultants, put in another batch of formal parliamentary questions seeking clarity on what external parties contributed to last term’s tax review.
P&R said all modelling and analysis for this work was done in-house by civil servants in a previous response, but Deputy Goy questioned how it classed the input of big accounting firms Deloitte and EY, as well as three independent economists who assess the States’ performance against fiscal policies.
£125,000 was spent with Deloitte to look at the impact of different tax measures on the economy, and £198,067 was spent with EY to assess different corporate tax options, P&R said.
Three economists who sit on the Fiscal Policy Panel provide only review and commentary on the States’ finances at a cost of around £55,000 per year and have done since 2010, it added.
But P&R insisted that all financial projections and modelling were produced by Treasury officials which were provided to external parties for additional assessment.
Any additional costs to external parties were “significantly reduced” by the States carrying out its own modelling, it added.
Deputy Goy said he still questioned what these external parties were commissioned to deliver if they did not influence the projections behind the tax review.
“Was their ultimate intention to provide external validation for a GST conclusion the Tax Review Steering Group had already reached?,” he asked.
“I will leave it to islanders to judge for themselves what the nearly half-a-million pounds of fees paid to external parties are actually for.”