I was lucky enough to spend some of my career in HM Revenue and Customs working in Large Business. As I’ve said here , HMRC was a lot like a collection of small villages. But some villages are always more select than others.  Working on the principle of allocating risk to resource, HMRC (and before it the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise) concentrated a proportionate slice of its attention on the 200-or-so businesses responsible for the biggest pot of tax.  It’s not that there were a lot of staff in Large Business; just that in proportion, compared to the staff dealing with the bulk of punters, they got to spend much more time looking at each business.  Large Business was sometimes loathed by the HMRC staff who had to deal with the day-to-day punters. Sometimes with justification. It wasn’t always clear that a subsidiary company was part of a Large Business, and sometimes Local Compliance could be halfway through dealing with a company when they suddenly got ...