Summary Introduction

Have you ever woken up and thought that a sum of £1 Billion just isn’t enough? If so, this can go one of two ways

Route one: Become a movie-type supervillain but unfortunately, we’re not in the market for one of those just now.

Route two: Far more interesting and offers greater job security. If you want to achieve an outstanding career highlight, this opportunity may just be your cup of tea.

Summary
HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) is one of the largest Government Departments and one of the country’s biggest organisations. Almost every individual and business in the UK is a direct customer of HMRC. We collect in excess of £500 billion a year in revenue from over 50 million customers across the UK.

We are an effective, efficient and impartial tax and payments authority with a vital purpose: To collect the money that pays for the UK’s public services and help families and individuals with targeted financial support.

Wealthy and Mid-sized Business Compliance (WMBC) is a directorate within HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) with over 4000 people across the UK delivering compliance activities that address identified compliance risks and negative customer behaviours. And our culture is changing.

We’re moving away from a reliance on the traditional downstream 1-2-1 interventions into one that places a greater emphasis onto upstream compliance activities. These help our various customer populations to get their tax returns right first time, increase their voluntary compliance behaviours and make it easier for HMRC to collect the correct amounts of tax at the correct times.

WMBC’s Insight, Growth & Risk’s Upstream Team is responsible to oversee and facilitate this cultural change and the end-to-end delivery of upstream compliance activity in WMBC. To help WMBC achieve this we need to be able to evaluate our upstream compliance activities in the best, most robust ways.

This role is a unique opportunity to see your skills directly lead a cultural change that will set new ways of working for many years to come.

And this can happen because of you. You can be that person Job description At HMRC we are committed to creating a great place to work for all our colleagues; an inclusive and respectful environment that reflects the diversity of the society we serve.


Diverse perspectives and experiences are critical to our success and we welcome applications from all people from all backgrounds with the experience and skills needed to perform this role

We’re looking for a Lead Data Scientist to take our business delivery way above and beyond the £1Bn level of value we’ve achieved from upstream compliance activities in each of the past three-years. And this is where we need you.

• Appraising, supervising, and evaluating new and novel compliance initiatives within the context of WMBC’s upstream interventions and the Promote, Prevent, Respond approach.

• Compiling evidence to support and inform teamwork within the department, including building strong teams and harnessing new technology.

• Leading the professional development of a team of evaluation analysts and ensuring a working culture based on trust and respect.

• Being a visible, credible leader across WMBC’s compliance and risk professionals.

• Crafting and delivering live operational trials in conjunction with CCG strategy and operational policy colleagues.

In return we will give you the ability to hone your professional skills against HMRC’s most unique populations and taxes where behavioural and social research haven’t ventured before.

Put all of these ingredients in place and WMBC will become a dynamic hub of innovative compliance activity, fit to meet the ever-changing need of the tax compliance world for the next decade and beyond.

Responsibilities We are seeking a team leader with a range of analytical and business skills, but immediate skills required are:

• Crafting and delivering live operational trials in conjunction with CCG strategy and operational policy colleagues.

• The technical remit will include elements of research, scenario modelling, evaluation of compliance interventions, and some data modelling.

• Testing compliance prompts within HMRC’s new digital tax services and new ways of compliance working across CCG.

• Commissioning and using customer research to design standard departmental communications for customer compliance.

• To help identify successful compliance approaches that can be scaled up and replicated more widely.

• To guide, assure and inspire confidence in our delivery partners that an approach rooted in upstream compliance activities is as rewarding as we expect it to be.

• To lead the professional upskilling and delivery capability of a team of evaluation analyst professionals who are as equally enthused to provide a high-quality service.

We need you and your skills to lead the delivery of evaluation methods, using recognised and robust statistical and research techniques, to demonstrate progress towards WMBC and HMRC revenue aspirations.

Essential Criteria

You are required to demonstrate experience of the following within your application:

• Comprehensive experience in scoping, design and delivery of research, statistical and data driven analysis products to underpin decision making by addressing business questions.

• Experience of managing and working in a project-based way coupled with consultancy and problem-solving skills.

• Design and delivery of research studies appraisals and trial design.

• Awareness of the use of data science principles and social research in statistical analysis.

• A comprehensive understanding of robust evaluation techniques and their application in a variety of situations, whilst being creative with an innovative approach to problem solving.

• Be proficient in the use of analytical software such as SAS, SQL, Access, relational databases or other packages to manipulate complex data sets.

• Experience of coding in VBA, Python or other languages.

Desirable Criteria

• Proven experience applying analytical skillset within a similar role.

• Experience working within the public sector.

• Previous experience communicating with various stakeholders.

Please Note: The successful applicant for this role will need to be eligible for and willing to undergo standard BPSS Checks following appointment into the post.