Speaker bio

Mark leads the Corporates, Tax Insight, Illuminate and DODG (digitisation of data gathering) team within the Risk Intelligence service of HMRC.

Mark  joined HMRC in 1986 and has worked mainly in Corporate tax Compliance across the spectrum from the smallest entities to super major oil groups surfacing error and fraud.

He first became aware of XBRL (Extensible business reporting language) the electronic “tagging” of key items in company accounts and computations in the autumn of 2010. Recognising the implications of having far more electronic data for companies than ever before, Mark took a personal interest in wanting to open up and realise value from the data.  His  team are an excellent blend of tax specialists, accountants and analysts, continually making innovative use of corporate digital data. The need to unlock value from the data led to the award-winning development of Illuminate, a sophisticated text searching tool.

The world of XBRL has opened very interesting doors, including the opportunity to speak at an XBRL World Conference in Orlando, working in China for 3 weeks when Mark was “loaned out” to the International Monetary Fund and discussions with representatives from numerous countries about how HMRC use and exploit XBRL data.

Mark's team also leads on a robotics program DoDG (Digitisation of Data Gathering) which seeks to automate and data gather information from heads of duty systems for creation of risk packages to aid compliance interventions. DoDG is one of the largest robotics programs across the civil service.