Mr. Niall Cody:

As I outlined earlier, it is a random selection out of the self-assessed case base. There are about 850 between individuals and companies. It is purely random. It does not include PAYE cases and I believe that is one of the flaws. Earlier, I outlined that because of how self-assessment works, there are a lot of non-trading people in the self-assessment system who are not really businesses at all. What we are really interested in doing is segmenting our case base to establish the traders who have trading activity and we could get a more sophisticated random audit programme. We are doing a lot of work on this. It is actually partly why we agreed to undertake the work on improving the audit gap. Improving the audit gap and the random audit programme is achievable. With the tax gap we would much prefer sectoral approaches and focusing on things such as oil and tobacco where, because they are excisable goods, they are properly controlled at the very top of the chain and one can ask where are there linkages.