Welsh Revenue Authority Corporate Plan 2025 to 2028

Croeso (welcome) to our corporate plan 2025 to 2028. This is the fourth plan we’ve produced since we were formed in 2017 to serve the people of Wales by managing devolved taxes. 

This is a good opportunity to look back on what we’ve already achieved as well as what we want to do in the future.

Since 2018 we’ve raised over £2 billion in Land Transaction Tax and Landfill Disposals Tax. This has generated vital revenue that Welsh Government has invested in public services, like schools and the NHS, in communities across Wales.

We’ve done this by adopting a Welsh way of doing tax – ‘Our Approach’. We’ve also had support from partners across Wales. We’re grateful to our colleagues in wider Welsh Government, taxpayers and their agents, and our best asset, the multi-skilled people who work for us. Diolch to all involved in our journey so far.

Now we’re set to grow and deliver even more sustainable, long-lasting services that will benefit Wales for years to come.

Assuming new legislation is passed in summer 2025, we’ll be responsible for collecting and managing a visitor levy and the national register of visitor accommodation in Wales. 

Our corporate plan explains how we’ll apply Our Approach and core principles to these new responsibilities. It also looks at the standards we need to meet and how we plan to continue to grow our capabilities and strengthen our partnerships.

In a previous corporate plan, we talked about 'arloesi' (to pioneer and innovate). This is as relevant today as it was then. As we evolve, we’ll continue to use 'hyder' (confidence) to remain 'uchelgeisiol a dewr' (ambitious and brave). We’ll set ourselves a high bar as we serve Wales into the future. We invite you to join us on the next step of our journey.

This corporate plan marks the beginning of a significant evolution for us, as we do more to deliver for Wales.

We’re a non-ministerial department of Welsh Government, created to work collaboratively to manage Wales’ devolved taxes. These taxes are specifically designed to fund vital Welsh public services in our communities.

Our purpose is to design and deliver revenue services and lead on better use of Welsh taxpayer data.

We aim to achieve this by: 

• making it easy to do the right thing
• being fair and consistent in the way we deliver our services
• being a sustainable and future-focused organisation 

We employ more than 100 people with skills and experience spanning 14 professions. We’re dedicated to providing a work environment that offers a sensible work–life balance, purpose-driven roles and flexibility.

Until now we have been responsible for Land Transaction Tax and Landfill Disposals Tax. For the purpose of the corporate plan, we have assumed that the Visitor Accommodation (Register and Levy) Etc. (Wales) Bill is passed in summer 2025. This will mean we’d also be responsible for the collection and management of the visitor levy and for operating the national register of visitor accommodation providers in Wales.

We’ll move towards becoming a services-based organisation that applies the principles of Our Approach in new ways to our additional areas of work. We’ll also mature this approach for our current taxes. Collaboration is part of our organisational fabric. Our partnerships with local authorities and other public sector organisations will strengthen our collective impact to deliver the best outcomes for the people of Wales.

We'll be subject to various new regulatory and legislative standards, including the Well-being of Future Generations Act and the Welsh Language Standards Regulations. Our Approach shows that we’ve long been committed in spirit and in our delivery to these standards. 

In particular, we’re proud of our Welsh language services and our commitment to working with people in their language of choice. Now we’re maturing, we look forward to embodying them in all that we do. You can find out more in the annex to our plan.

Main milestones

• 2017: formed by Welsh Government.
• 2018: collected and managed the first devolved taxes.
• 2021: £1 billion tax revenue raised.
• 2023/4: digital discovery project on visitor levy service.
• 2024: named ‘delivery partner’ for visitor levy and national register of visitor accommodation providers in Wales.
• 2025: £2 billion tax revenue raised.

We’re committed to delivering a fair tax system for Wales through what we call Our Approach – a uniquely Welsh way of doing tax. This approach starts from a position of high trust. It focuses on working together with taxpayers, representatives, partner organisations and the public to make sure we collect taxes fairly and efficiently.

Our Approach is inspired by Our Charter, which defines the principles underpinning our work. It’s inspired by 3 Welsh words.

Cydweithio 

This literally means ‘to work together’ and carries a sense of working towards a common goal. 

Cadarnhau

This suggests a solid, robust quality that can be relied on. It is about providing certainty, being accurate and reinforcing trust. 

Cywiro

This literally means ‘returning to the truth’ and is about how we work with people to resolve errors or concerns. 

By embodying these principles, we aim to provide an exemplary service that supports Wales’ ambitions for a fair and prosperous future. 

We regularly review both Our Approach and Our Charter to check they’re still effective. They represent our long-term approach to sustainable development. This ensures clarity and consistency in how we work throughout the lifetime of each corporate plan.

We’ve started our journey towards becoming a services-based organisation – a vision set out in our last corporate plan. 

This means we'll: 

• make it easier and fairer to support people who use our services, now and in the future
• continually learn, adapt and improve to meet people’s individual needs creating a sustainable model, which can be used to support more Welsh public services in future
• collaborate and engage with people who use services in the spirit of Our Approach 

Our end-to-end services will be register, tax and pay. These will be designed around our users and will operate continuously.

Making the most of our abilities

We already have a wealth of experience in tax design and management and are committed to supporting the personal growth and development of our people. Our goal is to empower our people with skills, expertise and the confidence to lead.

We're growing our in-house digital, data and technology capabilities. Our teams will be agile, multidisciplinary and focused on continuous learning.

This commitment to developing our internal capabilities will help us structure our organisation around services and the people who use them. It will make us more resilient in the face of future challenges and reduce our reliance on external partners.

We’re entering a new era as an organisation. We’ll be evolving the way we work as we implement the visitor levy and national register of visitor accommodation providers in Wales. Our core aim is to continue the excellence we’ve worked towards for delivering tax services so far. We know there will be challenges ahead. We’ll use our experience and expertise and stay true to Our Approach to steady us. 

We’ll focus on the following areas.

Expanding our strategic objectives

By the time this corporate plan ends, we’ll have been collecting and managing devolved taxes for 10 years. We’ve now matured to be part of the fabric of Wales’ public sector and that means greater responsibility and accountability. In particular we must comply with the standards of the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act and the Welsh Language Standards Regulations. 

Our Approach and Our Charter are already aligned to the sustainable development principle of the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act. This means we’re committed to improving the economic, social, cultural and environmental wellbeing of the people of Wales. And we’ve always supported the 5 key ways of working the Act sets out: long term, prevention, integration, collaboration and engagement.

We'll be talking more clearly about how we uphold and promote these standards. The appendix to our plan is the ‘wellbeing statement’ we must publish to comply with the Act.

Given their importance, we’ve decided to make the standards a prominent feature of our strategic objectives, alongside our equality objectives. We also want to be sustainable and as well placed to deliver for the long-term good of Wales as possible. So this future focus is another prominent strategic objective for us.

We’ve also kept easy and fair as strategic objectives for this period because this is what people expect of our services.

Evolving Our Approach

Applying the Welsh way of doing tax, Our Approach, to managing Welsh taxes has proved successful. Starting from a premise of high trust, we've developed this model over time to enable us to maximise the proportion of tax paid correctly first time. It also enhances our ability to manage tax risk (risk areas we’ve identified where taxpayers are more likely to get their taxes wrong). 

The benefits are clear to see, and we’ve used Our Approach to guide us in many ways, from digital changes to hosting educational tax forums and the way we approach enquiries. How we apply Our Approach is constantly evolving and will never be finished. 

Now we look forward to applying it in a more local context, working alongside our partners in local authorities and a wider range of customers to deliver the visitor levy and national register of visitor accommodation providers in Wales.

Cultivating our culture

We’re a people organisation and our culture is our USP (unique selling point). We have a highly engaged workforce, as our Civil Service People Survey results on engagement show. We know high engagement results in high performance. But with the advent of the visitor levy and national register of visitor accommodation providers in Wales we’ll need to grow as an organisation. 

We want to protect the culture we’ve cultivated by working together as a team. We want to continue to be a place with purpose, where people come to grow their career, do interesting and important work, and make a difference to the people of Wales.

Strengthening our partnerships

We’re at our best when we work in partnership with others – they'll be central to our success, as will our relationship with our customers. We’ll deepen our partnership with Natural Resources Wales to further use our complementary powers to tackle waste crime. We’ll continue to work closely with Welsh Government on the design of new revenue services. We’ll also strengthen our work with other tax authorities. 

Beyond this, we’ll work with new stakeholders to ensure the delivery of the visitor levy and national register of visitor accommodation providers in Wales is a success. We want to partner with local authorities and the visitor accommodation sector.

Easy 

We’ll make it easy to do the right thing by: 

Being accessible, supportive and proactive

We will: 

• encourage customers to check queries with us to resolve as many as possible first time
• make our services accessible to all 

Offering services that help people do what they need to do

We will: 

• amend current services and design new ones with the user front and centre
• work with customers to encourage and support them to put things right

Making using Welsh easy for everyone

We will: 

• support our people to achieve courtesy (cwrteisi) Welsh
• increase our use of Welsh internally and grow (tyfu) our confidence
• encourage (hybu) our service users to communicate with us in Welsh 

Fair 

We’ll be fair and consistent in the way we deliver our services by: 

Making it more difficult to do the wrong thing

We will:

• take a data-focused approach to identify risks
• use intelligence to revise our guidance, systems and processes
• seek legislative change, where appropriate, to tackle risks

Meeting our equality objectives

We will: 

• foster a fair and inclusive workplace where our people can thrive
• increase our understanding of equality, diversity and inclusion to remove discrimination and bias from service delivery
• reflect equality into our procurement process

Taking action to put things right

We will: 

• increase our activity on tax risk mitigation and recovery
• use our legal powers fairly to identify avoidance and evasion and take the right action to recover unpaid tax 

Sustainable 

We’ll be a sustainable and future-focused organisation by:

Building capability to become more resilient

We will:

• become a more service-based organisation offering consistent services
• build our internal capacity and capability and rely less on others as we deliver for Wales

Making the most of our resources

We will: 

• align our organisational design with services
• support our people to develop their skills and build careers beyond us to continue to deliver for Wales
• make sure our governance empowers our people to take decisions at the right level

Building newer and stronger partnerships

We will:

• design our services for visitor levy and national register of visitor accommodation providers in Wales in partnership with businesses, local authorities and Welsh government
• continue to support Welsh Government with the design and delivery of revenue services
• deepen our partnerships with our delivery partners

Adopting a service-oriented approach 

Our 'Easy and Fair' measures will continue to be centred on our service-based approach. This means that we'll evaluate our work as end-to-end services from the customer’s perspective. We cover the entire customer journey from registration to tax calculation and final payment. Organising our measures in this way enables us to assess success more effectively and makes sure they align with our customers experiences. 

It's difficult to measure the sustainability of an organisation, so we have chosen several measures which we think give a rounded view of the health of the organisation and how it's serving the long-term needs of Wales. We may evolve these over the period of this corporate plan.

Easy

Tax service

• 90% of survey respondents report our services are easy to use.
• Reduction in the average length of time to process cases.
• Average time of no longer than 10 days to process a higher rate refund case.

Payment service

• 90% of survey respondents report our services are easy to use.
• Reduction in the average length of time to process cases.
• 97% of payments correctly made first time.

Fair

Tax service

Within our active tax risk profiles we'll:

• reduce the proportion of tax returns that are flagged risky
• carry out tax recovery proportionate to the risk levels
• increase the proportion of investigations where an amount of tax is recovered or protected
• minimise the amount of time it takes to conclude a tax investigation

Payment service

• 99% of tax raised in the same period last year is now collected.
• 95% of penalties raised in the same period last year are now collected.
• Average time to collect debts.
• Average age of outstanding debts.

Sustainable

What we're measuring and how we're measuring it. 

Automation

98% of cases will require no manual intervention between receipt of payment and case closure.

Staff engagement

Narrative around how we remain as one of the most highly ranked civil organisations to work in

Use of the Welsh language

Narrative report on our use of the Welsh language.

Future generations of Wales

Narrative report on how we're embedding the 5 ways of working in the organisation.

Measures not included 

Certain aspects of our performance are best conveyed through narrative rather than numerical data. This is because in some instances, meaningful numerical metrics may not be readily available, may not fully capture the broader context, or could compromise confidentiality.

Some measures are still under development. We’re currently designing our registration service, so we don’t yet know how to best measure its success. We remain committed to providing clear, informative, and accessible updates wherever possible and we’ll publish measures for the registration service when they’re available. 

We won’t duplicate key performance indicators we already report elsewhere. For instance, our Annual Equality Report and Plan provides insights into staff demographics and the equality objectives, and our Annual Report and Accounts offers comprehensive details on performance, governance, workforce, and financial management.

This statement, published in line with the Wellbeing of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015, explains how we're building sustainable development into WRA objectives to support the 7 wellbeing goals.

The wellbeing goals 

There are 7 connected wellbeing goals for Wales. They are:

1. A prosperous Wales.
2. A resilient Wales.
3. A healthier Wales.
4. A more equal Wales.
5. A Wales of more cohesive communities.
6. A Wales of vibrant culture and thriving Welsh language.
7. A globally responsible Wales. 

You can find a full description of the goals on Welsh Government’s website.

These wellbeing goals are underpinned by a National Well-being Indicators Framework. This provides a series of quantifiable outcomes for each goal through specific wellbeing indicators set by Welsh Government. 

Our wellbeing objectives

We're in a unique place within the Welsh public sector. We raise revenue Welsh Government uses to deliver its own objectives, often by funding the activities of other public sector bodies. We contribute to the wellbeing of Wales by collecting that revenue efficiently. 

Our statutory functions are set out in the Tax Collection and Management (Wales) Act 2016 and Government of Wales Act 2006. We must use our resources to carry out these statutory functions effectively. Our direct contribution to the wellbeing of Wales is largely through the way we deliver our services to the people of Wales.

Our corporate plan strategic objectives are also our wellbeing objectives. Briefly, these objectives are:

• Easy: we’ll make it easy to do the right thing.
• Fair: we’ll be fair and consistent in the way we deliver our services.
• Sustainable: we’ll be a sustainable and future-focused organisation. 

Over the coming years, we'll become an increasingly services-oriented organisation, implementing and extending a customer-focused model to deliver our existing taxes and future functions. 

These strategic objectives, when delivered through Our Approach and underpinned by Our Charter, will contribute to the 7 wellbeing goals. Our remit means we contribute to some goals more than others. How our strategic objectives reflect specific wellbeing goals is shown below. 

Setting and acting on our objectives

In each corporate plan cycle we set targeted actions under the strategic objectives. These focus on what can be achieved within the plan’s time frame. Our wellbeing objectives will be reviewed and updated if necessary as part of our corporate planning cycle.

Involving our people and partners

Partnerships are core to what we do. Our successes belong to all our people. We appreciate their expertise in delivering services. They play a key role in achieving our objectives and wellbeing goals. 

We’re subject to the Social Partnership Duty that public bodies in Wales need to meet. This means we involve everyone who contributes to what we do in discussing challenges we face and possible solutions. 

We’re committed to working closely with our trade union partners. We worked with our trade union partners to create our objectives, taking onboard their feedback to refine our approach. This has ensured their full support for our objectives

Reporting on wellbeing progress

We'll submit social partnership reports to the Social Partnership Council. Our first such report will be submitted in 2026. 

Integrating our strategic objectives with our wellbeing objectives means the wellbeing of future generations is built into our work. We’ll review these objectives regularly and publish clear information in future WRA annual reports and accounts.

We’re also subject to the Public Sector Equality Duty. We report on the work we do to support equality and human rights in our annual equality report and strategic objectives.

WRA strategic wellbeing objectives and actions

Being accessible, supportive and proactive

We will:

• encourage customers to check queries with us to resolve as many as possible first time
• make our services accessible to all

This supports wellbeing goals 1 to 7. View the full list of wellbeing goals. 

Offering services that help people do what they need to do

We will:

• amend current services and design new ones with the user front and centre
• work with customers to encourage and support them to put things right

This supports wellbeing goals 1 to 5. View the full list of wellbeing goals. 

Making using Welsh easy for everyone

We will:

• support our people to achieve courtesy (cwrteisi) in Welsh
• increase our use of Welsh internally and grow (tyfu) our confidence
• encourage (hybu) our service users to communicate with us in Welsh

This supports wellbeing goals 1,3,4,5,6,7. View the full list of wellbeing goals. 

Making it more difficult to do the wrong thing

We will:

• take a data-focused approach to identify risks
• use this intelligence to revise guidance, systems and processes
• seek legislative change, where appropriate, to tackle risks

This supports wellbeing goals 3 to 5. View the full list of wellbeing goals. 

Meeting our equality objectives

We will:

• foster a fair and inclusive workplace where our people can thrive
• increase our understanding of equality, diversity and inclusion to remove discrimination and bias from service delivery
• reflect equality into our procurement process

This supports wellbeing goals 1,3,4,5. View the full list of wellbeing goals. 

Taking action to put things right

We will:

• increase our activity on tax risk mitigation and recovery
• use our powers fairly to identify avoidance and evasion and take the right action to recover unpaid tax

This supports wellbeing goals 1,2,3,5,6,7. View the full list of wellbeing goals. 

Building capability to become more resilient

We will:

• become a more service-based organisation offering consistent services
• build our internal capacity and capability and rely less on others as we deliver for Wales

This supports wellbeing goals 1,3,4. View the full list of wellbeing goals.

Making the most of our resources

We will:

• align our organisational design with services.
• support our people to develop their skills and build careers that deliver for Wales.
• make sure our governance empowers our people to take decisions at the right level. 

This supports wellbeing goals 1,2,3,4,7. View the full list of wellbeing goals.

Building newer and stronger partnerships

We will:

• design our services for the visitor levy and national register of visitor accommodation providers in Wales in partnership with businesses, local authorities and Welsh Government.
• continue to support Welsh Government with the design and delivery of revenue services.
• deepen our partnerships with our delivery partners

This supports wellbeing goals 1 to 7. View the full list of wellbeing goals.