Treasury leaks Word of Budget revisions

Sir Humphrey flummoxed by Office feature

By John Leyden • Get more from this author

Posted in Music and Media, 22nd April 2002 17:24 GMT

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The Inland Revenue has leaked the contents of revisions to last week's budget by publishing briefing documents on its Web site using Word.

Until earlier this afternoon, anybody fancying an insight into the Treasury mandarins tidy up of earlier - politically embarrassing - drafts of supporting documents could have visited the Inland Revenue's own site. No longer.

The offending page has now being pulled, so we're indebted to those funny chaps at NTK for providing the unedited highlights of those revisions.

The "suspiciously Old Labour phrase" that the government wanted to "ensure the nation receives a fair share of the profits from the exploitation of the North Sea" was replaced with the politically more palatable "the North Sea fiscal regime does not strike the right balance between promoting investment and taking an adequate share of revenue derived from a national resource", NTK reports.

As they say, it's nice to see the Inland Revenue practicing "open government" for a change... ®