About the job

Job summary

This is an influential role in HMRC. The Deputy Director is responsible for over 100 technical experts across a wide range of HMRC’s policy responsibilities and functions, working in partnership with policy and operational colleagues to ensure the law is being applied correctly and where appropriate, bringing expertise and insight to bear in supporting the case for change. 

The Deputy Director will ensure the team works in a proactive, innovative, and collaborative way with colleagues across HMRC, combining the team’s deep technical expertise with flexible and adaptable skills to support the correct interpretation and application of Income Tax, National Insurance and wider social policy legislation (e.g., National Minimum Wage) within HMRC and by customers. They will support the team in helping drive forward improvements to legislation and guidance to support Ministerial and HMRC objectives, especially on simplification and upstream compliance. 

Job description

• Providing highly visible and strong people leadership across a diverse and geographically spread team, driving performance improvement and technical excellence.
• Leading the team in working collaboratively with policy colleagues to ensure policies and processes are technically well designed and operable by customers and, importantly, be a catalyst for future policy and process ideas drawing on the extensive insight across the technical teams.
• Understanding the requirements of both internal and external customers and ensuring IPD provides high quality, timely, expert advice to operational teams, policy owners, litigators and external Counsel, and other stakeholders.  
• Providing senior oversight and strategic direction to support decision making on reputationally significant technical cases and litigation and be IPD’s representative on senior cross-HMRC governance boards. 
• Maintaining and developing a future pipeline of technical tax expertise in personal taxes and, with other technical teams across HMRC, ensuring best practice and intelligence is pooled and shared. 
• Championing the tax profession within department, improving the visibility of the technical community within CS&TD and identifying and promoting development opportunities for colleagues working in technical teams. 
• Actively supporting IPD’s wider goals and objectives as part of the IPD Senior Leadership Team.

Person specification

Essential Criteria:

• Strong track record of providing visible and inclusive leadership with a proven ability to develop a large, motivated, engaged and high performing team.  
• The jobholder will be an experienced tax professional with strong direct tax knowledge and experience, a good working knowledge of a range of tax regimes and is required to have successfully completed and passed the HMRC Tax Specialist Programme or a predecessor qualification (FT2, TPDP, ITS2 etc.), or an external equivalent qualification incorporating direct tax modules. 
• Strong evidence of applying sound judgement and decision making in complex and fast-moving environments, taking policy, technical, legal, customer and reputational factors into account.  
• Able to expertly combine excellent technical awareness with the proven ability to think strategically and align outcomes to HMRC’s strategic objectives, policy aims and operational demands. This requires the ability to apply insights from operational and litigation experience to identify and advocate for policy and process change.  
• The job holder must have the ability to analyse, explain and discuss the interpretation of complex tax technical issues to engage with both highly qualified internal and external tax professionals but also translate issues for a wider non-technical audience such as Ministers, Treasury and Commissioners.  

Desirable qualifications and professional memberships:

• Experience working in Personal Tax; including Income Tax, National Insurance Contributions (NICs), Pensions and Savings and/or employment status.
• Experience working across policy, technical, and compliance environments.

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £75,000, HM Revenue and Customs contributes £20,250 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.

Things you need to know

Selection process details

For details on the Selection Process please see the Candidate Pack.

All Criminal Record Checks applications are considered fairly in accordance with the DBS Code of Practice and the Recruitment of ex-offenders Policy.

Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.

Security

Successful candidates must undergo a criminal record check. People working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard (opens in new window) checks.

Nationality requirements

This job is broadly open to the following groups:

• UK nationals
• nationals of the Republic of Ireland
• nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS) (opens in a new window)
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
• individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
• Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service

Further information on nationality requirements (opens in a new window)

Working for the Civil Service

The Civil Service Code (opens in a new window) sets out the standards of behaviour expected of civil servants.

We recruit by merit on the basis of fair and open competition, as outlined in the Civil Service Commission's recruitment principles (opens in a new window). The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equal opportunities. As such, we run a Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria. The Civil Service also offers a Redeployment Interview Scheme to civil servants who are at risk of redundancy, and who meet the minimum requirements for the advertised vacancy.