HMRC established the Taxpayer Protection Taskforce in April 2021 to increase its compliance activities on the two employment support schemes and Eat Out to Help Out.29 HMRC told us it had received £100 million to fund the cost of moving over 1,000 compliance staff from its tax compliance teams to the Taskforce so that over the medium term it would not lose yield from tax compliance. We asked whether the Taxpayer Protection Taskforce had been a success. HMRC told us that the Taskforce had allowed it to pull in staff with different expertise to work together to address non-compliance on the schemes in a coherent, focused way. HMRC said that the Taskforce was on track to recover somewhere between £525 million and £625 million from investigating error and fraud. However, this is less than HMRC’s original expectation that the Taskforce would recover £800 million to £1 billion.30 Recoveries by the Taskforce are in addition to the £536 million HMRC recovered before it established the Taskforce in April 2021.31 But as we reported in January 2023, recoveries of around £1.1 billion would only account for a quarter of HMRC’s estimate of the most likely level of error and fraud on the schemes.32