I read your article with interest and accept a lot of what was propounded. I feel that perhaps there are a couple of further aspects that are worthy of notice .It will be interesting to see how the Inland Revenue handle the question of Tax Credits for the self -employed . Their first hurdle will be the absorption of Family Credit . We discussed at work yesterday how what is essentially a weekly benefit can be converted into something which is only currently assessed on an annual basis , since a self employed man has to submit his accounts or equivalent only once a year. The Revenues are only currently accustomed to billing or refunding on a yearly basis and the mechanism does not exist for weekly issues of cheques. One can see an opportunity for the Government to gather interest on this money over a year and only release it when the accounts are audited and agreed . This is a problem which would also be common to HB when the takeover happens and will have to be considered from a very early stage . I believe that local office revenue staff have yet to receive any training as far as Family Credit is concerned . The take-over is in October [?] and the reality is next April . From what I understand the BA staff at the old FC Unit at Lytham have been taken into the revenue [ in the same manner as the BA Contributions Units]  to continue with the assessment work, and I suppose will issue the amount of benefit to be paid to the relevant customers' tax offices, who will have to issue the coding notices. One can still envisage a similar scenario with HB Tax Credits, though probably with large clearing houses around the country for claim forms rather than local staff

The other point is the current Single Gateway project which may also be showing the way forward whereby all benefits are to be  dealt with at a single point of contact .Here is where one can see an opportunity for the reduction in staff by the removal of what are in effect duplicated functions  . The crux here clearly takes responsibility for the whole show at the end of the day when it finally comes into effect . My contacts with the BA lead me to believe that the days of buying people out of the BA with attractive redundancy packages came to an end last year. What we are witnessing here is the return of these functions under one roof as was the case prior to 1983 when the DHSS had to do a yearly updating for rents on what was then IS. Benefits as they currently stand are complicated and will always remain so , as I do not believe that there will ever be a simple set of entitlement conditions for any benefit let alone a whole series . I was interested also to read about the consequent loss of business for computer companies should HB vanish , but is not currently the case that a lot of government / private initiatives in this field are currently labelled at least by the Independent as "fiascos". I offer you the BA's OpStrat  allegedly three times over budget and the National Insurance Recording System which fell into intensive care last year and has cost a fair few Fraud referrals within the BA  as it is not in a position to issue notices about people who have been awarded more than 52 credits for any one year  i.e. those who have worked and continuously signed in one year. I imagine that there is money to be made but mind those penalty clauses.