The Welsh Revenue Authority (WRA) has today (7 July) published its Annual Report and Accounts 2020 to 2021, reporting that £242 million tax raised during the last financial year will directly fund public services across Wales.
Established by the Welsh Government, the WRA started collecting and managing revenue from 2 devolved Welsh taxes, Land Transaction Tax and Landfill Disposals Tax, in April 2018.
The publication reflects the WRA’s performance during the financial year, the activities it carried out, how it is governed and managed and future challenges for the organisation.
The report focuses on how the organisation continued to operate during coronavirus, responding positively to significant challenges to offer digital services through the efforts of staff and the use of technology.
Kathryn Bishop, Chair of the WRA, said:
This year’s Annual Performance Report and Accounts comes at the end of another remarkable year.
In February 2020, our offices in Treforest were flooded, along with several buildings and many homes in that community and in March 2020, we all began to deal with the constraints imposed by coronavirus. We were able to respond to the first of those crises very well, implementing our business continuity plans rapidly and successfully, and were already working remotely using our digital capability when the pandemic lockdowns became necessary.
We’re aware that the challenges of the last 15 months are not over, and there are other priorities to be addressed in the year ahead: meeting the demands of a new government, moving into new offices which will be our future home, whilst we are recovering from the impact of COVID-19. I’m confident that, based on the excellent efforts of the past 15 months, the Welsh Revenue Authority will be able to meet those challenges.
Dyfed Alsop, Chief Executive of the WRA, said:
This report provides a wide range of information to show what we achieved. The increased use of our digital services, to file and pay, and the impressively high on-time completion rates, are evidence of the partnership we have with our taxpayers and agents. I’m grateful for the support they, along with our delivery partners, have shown us.
I’m proud of the way we maintained high levels of support for tax payers and agents. We moved our tax seminars online, kept our guidance up to date and, as far as possible, worked hard to make repayments on time. We also implemented rapid budget changes to the taxes we are responsible for and all done remotely.
These accomplishments show how we kept innovating and working collaboratively even working from home. We could only do this by making decisions around what not to prioritise. We were clear, above all, we needed to keep our people safe, support each other adapting to working from home and provide extra time off for the unforeseeable additional responsibilities and crises we have all had to contend with.
For further information, see the Annual Report and Accounts 2020 to 2021.
Meanwhile the annual Land Transaction Tax statistics have also been published for the period April 2020 to March 2021.