Until last summer the country's top tax official, Dave Hartnett is taking up a job with tax consultancy Deloitte. Does this matter? Yes, it does; both in its specifics, and the light it casts on the relationship between our governing elite and corporate interests.
Mr Hartnett left Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs amid some controversy. It is not every civil servant who is accused of being a liar, as he was by Margaret Hodge. The chair of the public accounts committee accused him of lying over his claim that he did not deal with the tax affairs of Goldman Sachs. He had in fact struck a "sweetheart deal" with the bankers, letting them off a £10m interest bill. That revelation sat alongside other tittle-tattle such as his standing as the most wined and dined official in Whitehall, eating 10 meals with KPMG alone over three years. One doesn't need to buy the accusations of a meals-for-deals strategy to see in all this a too-cosy relationship between the regulator and the businesses that he regulated. Even other tax professionals went along with that, especially outside the Big Four. Such criticism was justified by Mr Hartnett and his pushing of "enhanced relationships" with big companies. The commissioner might initially have intended the concept to denote more open dealing with big taxpayers and less of the old cat-and-mousery; but it ended up as a variant of the now-familiar light-touch supervision.
The great disappointment is that Mr Hartnett set out to be a much tougher taxman. It is hard to think of any senior official with as in-depth a knowledge of tax law, or with as great renown as a bruiser. Mr Hartnett was a Revenue lifer, yet the hardman ended his career by becoming a soft touch. His appointments to Deloitte and HSBC won't alter that reputation. Mr Hartnett will help Deloitte to advise overseas governments on how to implement "effective tax regimes", which seems rather like dispatching the top brass of Stella Artois to advise on alcohol abuse. The contrast between his soft landing and the brutal treatment administered to Osita Mba, the whistleblower who exposed the Goldmans deal, is stark and troubling.
Provision must be made for top public servants to move on to other jobs, but the current system is not robust enough at detecting possible conflicts of interest. In its emphasis on avoiding personal lobbying of ministers and advisers by former colleagues, the advisory committee on business appointments pays too little attention to how they might otherwise massage relations between a company and Whitehall. It is thus worryingly narrow in how it interprets possible overlaps of corporate interest. The system must be recast to adopt a precautionary principle in looking for possible dangers of abusing insider expertise.