Statement from Chair

I am delighted to report another year of excellent progress at Revenue Scotland. You can see from the full Report now presented that we have collected revenues of over £855 million and kept our costs well below our benchmark of 1% of revenues, demonstrating a great commitment to effective cost controls and efficiency. In addition we have demonstrated through our Futures Project that we can move to a flexible and dynamic hybrid working model that will continue to support our relentless drive to deliver excellent value for money through our operating model. The commitment of our staff and leadership team to creating a great working environment is reaping dividends through excellent staff satisfaction scores, with the latest People Survey placing Revenue Scotland amongst the highest scoring organisations in the Civil Service, not just in Scotland, but UK wide. Our continued commitment to people development gives everyone at Revenue Scotland the opportunity to acquire new skills and improve existing ones, and this deepening of the quality results in better engagement, better compliance and a real commitment to raising standards across all aspects of the organisation. The results this year demonstrate the really positive trajectory we are maintaining.

We have now laid our plans for 2024-27 before Parliament which takes all of our commitments a stage further. Our four strategic outcomes underpin everything we do around Operational Excellence, Investing in our People, Working with Others and Expanding our Horizons. This approach undoubtedly aligns to the challenges laid out in Public Service Reform more widely and demonstrates our unwavering commitment to be the very best organisation we can be and I would recommend, if you have the opportunity, to have a look at our Corporate Plan which backs up the headlines with detailed actions. I also want to highlight how important it has been to engage more widely with Scottish Parliament as well as other stakeholders. I am really grateful to all MSPs and Committees who have engaged with Revenue Scotland over the last 12 months, we have benefitted greatly from all of the constructive conversations. We are committed to this continuing at pace, and to widening our collaboration with the key stakeholders. One great benefit is learning from others and we do this willingly and positively as we continue to enhance our approaches across a wide spectrum of activity.

As we look forward to playing our full part in the introduction of new Taxes, for example Scottish Aggregates Tax and the possibility of a Scottish Building Safety Levy, our ability to enhance our digital capabilities remains a high priority. The past year has seen further investment in improving our capabilities in this important area as we stand ready to implement our "Digital First" approach to these new as well as existing taxes and levies. Against a backdrop of a challenging environment both in Scotland and more widely our people have responded with enthusiasm, commitment and great agility. On behalf of the Board my heartfelt thanks to everyone in the team for delivering such a strong set of results. We can look forward with confidence to delivering on our Corporate Plan over the coming years and giving our stakeholders the continuous improvement that they expect for the benefit of Scotland.

Aidan O’Carroll 
Chair of the Board

Statement from the Chief Executive and Accountable Officer

This annual report and accounts covers the performance of Revenue Scotland for 2023- 24, set within the context of it also being the final year of our 2021-24 Corporate Plan. As I look back to 2021, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was still being felt. Considering how the operating model of Revenue Scotland has changed as a result, we are quite a different organisation now compared to then. We have moved from working from a fixed office base pre-pandemic to wholly remote working during the pandemic. Now, we are developing our own model of hybrid working. This model has the delivery of optimal performance by our staff, and therefore by our organisation as a whole, at its heart. In 2023-24, we completed our Futures Project, which has ensured the delivery of clarity as to our hybrid operating model for our staff, financial savings in a reduction of the office space we require in Victoria Quay, a new touchdown facility in partnership with Registers of Scotland, for use of space within their Glasgow office, providing office facilities for those staff who live closer to Glasgow than Edinburgh and ensuring our staff have access to technology which supports this new form of working. We continue to monitor our performance to ensure we remain open to further evolution of this way of working should it be required but as things currently stand, we are attracting talent into Revenue Scotland, in part because of the approach we have taken to hybrid working. Being an employer of choice remains one of our core objectives as we look ahead.

Taking a strategic approach to workforce planning has been key to continuing to build our capability as a tax authority and as a public body. This year, we prioritised digital and data, and project and programme leadership, while continuing to nurture and provide opportunities for development for all staff. As will be seen from the performance report, we have continued to deliver excellent performance against all of our KPIs. I am particularly pleased with the People Survey results this year, which once again rated us as high performing and in the top 25% of the 103 civil service organisations who participated. We scored particularly highly for how we lead and manage change, reflecting the conscious investment we made in the learning and development of our senior leaders and the wider culture we have sought to foster within our organisation. We are adding value to policy discussions on future taxes, bringing both our tax technical expertise to bear and also our knowledge of how to deliver programmes of change well. This is important in the context of Scottish Aggregates Tax where a multi-disciplinary team from Revenue Scotland is working in partnership with the Scottish Government to deliver the next wholly devolved tax to Scotland. We are also starting our preparatory work for a Scottish Building Safety Levy and expanding our reach and reputation for the expertise we have in tax and as a high-performing public body into other discussions too, with central government and more widely across other public bodies and into new sectors such as local government.

Our work on Equalities and Diversity is another area where we have made real progress, with the finalisation of our mainstreaming report and creation of a steering group to take a more strategic view of the work we are doing across our functions to embed Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) principles and practices into our organisational culture and everything we do. As we look ahead to our new Corporate Plan for 2024-27 which is set within the context of a challenging financial climate, we stand ready as an energetic, digitally enabled, efficient public body to engage in the reform and delivery of public services in Scotland. The model we have adopted has much to offer in how public services can be delivered working collaboratively with an ethos that has public service at its heart.

Elaine Lorimer 
Chief Executive