The academic research by Graeme Currie and Kevin Morrell, of Warwick Business School, and Penelope Tuck, of the University of Birmingham, looked at how HMRC had been reformed from 2003 to 2012.  They looked at documentary data and conducted 43 semi-structured interviews with senior tax inspectors co-opted into ‘hybrid’ manager roles.

According to the research, these hybrid roles required managers to become more customer-focused. While, as expected, some professionals resisted and others embraced the change, the study suggests others opted for a novel third response: leaving HMRC for opportunities in the private sector.

The study claims that with the knowledge gained from being on the ‘inside' of HMRC, these tax professionals are ideally placed to exploit the new management reforms to help companies avoid tax and undermine the tax profession.

Professor Currie said: ‘Where professionals cross the line from being a regulator to becoming a “regulatee”, this could create problems.

‘These gamekeepers-turned-poachers could compound the impact of a policy shift because they are best placed to capitalise on any changes to the agency's focus. As former insiders they are “canny customers”'.

Currie went so far as to suggest that: ‘Professional values of independence and public service in the tax profession may over time be eroded by the increasing movement of tax professionals from HMRC into more commercially-orientated corporate clients, at the same time as frontline interactions across the regulator-regulatee divide shape service.’

In a paper based on the research, Professor Morrell argues the shift to hybrid managerial roles - they are positions that combine the technical skills with the managing of staff - is a way to address a failure of implementing reform as frontline workers have been co-opted into hybrid managerial roles.

‘There has been a change in emphasis for tax inspectors from 2003 to 2012. It is no longer a purely technical role, inspecting accounts, but now encompasses a client discourse that challenges a public service ethic in which professionals exhibit independence,’ Morrell argued.

The study argues effective governance of these new hybrid managerial roles at HMRC will require an understanding of the labour market to temper the excess influence by those hybrid managers who have left to work in the private sector.

Morrell warned: ‘In settings where it is easy for individuals to move from regulator to regulatee, the pace and consequences of reform will be harder to govern. This runs the danger of eroding professional values.’