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Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill

I am grateful for that response because it will repay careful study, but it is not safe to equate a self-employed person’s tax return with a fair and true representation of his or her current net wealth. There are perfectly understood restrictions on what needs to be reported. I am not saying that anyone is doing anything illegal, but with clever accountants, self-employed people make it their business—and it would be stupid if they did not—to do everything within the law to constrain their visible income for taxation purposes. Therefore, I doubt that it is sufficient to take that figure—whatever it may be—as an accurate reflection of something with which we can make a calculation. I may be missing something, but it is all very well to say that the generality of the working age population does not have income, investment or anything else, but that 7 per cent of the case load is what nearly drove the agency into self-destruction. That may be an exaggeration, but an enormous amount of time, energy and professional time was devoted to trying to pin down what was actually going on with a small proportion of the case load involving self-employment. I counsel caution.