Given the high return on investment HMRC gets from its compliance work with large businesses, we asked it why it did not spend more on the large business directorate. HMRC told us that it was recruiting 5,500 full- time equivalent compliance staff across the organisation, but that these staff would mostly focus on small business compliance as this is where the majority of the tax gap lies.12 HMRC wrote to us after the evidence session and explained that the large business directorate plans to recruit 50 compliance officers from HMRC’s Civil Compliance Foundation Learning programme, and following an external recruitment campaign in Autumn 2025, is on track to recruit 48 new, external tax specialists.13