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Without looking for the conclusions, which clearly are a different issue, do we know what the terms and scope of the different investigations were?

Can you share the scope of the SFC investigation?

Auditor General, I want to fully get my head round the different investigations that are going on. I understand that the SFC started a governance review in July 2021, which it delivered in August 2021—in other words, it did so extremely quickly. Do we know what the terms of that investigation were?

At the extraordinary board meeting on 30 November 2021, it was agreed to commission two independent investigations. I assume that one of those was on the chair of the board, with the other being on the principal and the interim clerk. It is now May 2022. How did the SFC manage to do its governance review in four weeks, while, months after the other investigations were commissioned, nothing has come out the other end?

So you are satisfied that what we can see visibly as the impact of the poor governance is manifested in your report.

Okay.

I have one final question. Obviously, we do not have the results of the independent investigations and you cannot comment on the conclusions of those. Will you be able to give us more comment once the investigations have been completed? Will you come back to the issue?

I have a couple of specific questions. After the previous meeting, I looked at the National Audit Office report and extracted from it just an A4 page—it could have been more, but I kept to the main points—setting out the references to estimates, information not being available, projections and all sorts of other things. If we take each issue individually, perhaps they are explainable but, if we take them in aggregate, surely the impact on Scottish income tax is significant.

I do not know whether you have done a crude exercise such as the one that I have done, but it seems to me that, taking the issues in the round, there must be concerns about the accuracy of the income tax take, which obviously has huge implications for the Scottish Government and for HMRC. In a general sense, how are you going to deal with all those issues? Are we going to get away from all the estimates and the fact that we cannot identify individual figures and so forth? Maybe that is for Jackie McGeehan.

Is it not a yes or no answer?

You have a huge task because, before the pandemic, you managed about 3.8 million taxpayers in debt and, as of September 2021, that number was 6.2 million. That is a huge hill to climb.

I think that this committee would be interested if there are specific figures about taxpayers in debt in Scotland.

Stephen Lewis, in areas of deprivation where residents have less disposable income, should there be a subsidy to allow regeneration to continue and be sustainable into the future?