"It should come as no surprise that the Minister regards advice from the Department as advice. He has said on numerous occasions that he takes all advice into consideration and then proceeds with what he considers to be the most appropriate course of action."

It should also come as no surprise that these words were uttered by the spokeswoman for the Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy. The comment was made last week after this newspaper revealed Mr McCreevy went against the advice of his officials in deciding to bring in the special savings incentive scheme.

The scheme - which comes in on May 1st - involves the Government making a 25 per cent top-up payment to savers who lock their money up for five years.

Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act chart more than five months of meetings, position papers, tax strategy group meetings and other work before senior civil servants concluded on November 15th they just could not recommend such a course of action.

The next significant document on the Department files is a note of a meeting between Mr McCreevy and some of his officials on January 27th, 2001 - almost two months later.

The two-page memo is tagged: "Savings - wants new scheme/details attached." These enigmatic few words appear to be all that records a decision by the Minister to overrule officials and bring in a controversial measure that could cost the Exchequer several hundred million a year. Details of the type of scheme Mr McCreevy favoured were then fleshed out and all subsequent documentation - up to February 15th - deals with the implementation of Mr McCreevy's wishes.

As the opening quotation indicates, Mr McCreevy does not feel bound by the advice of his civil servants. His supporters point out that he is an accountant and has been a long time in politics, most of them as a maverick backbencher, and has his own considered views on what he should be doing.

This is a fair point, but it is hard to believe that during his wanderings in the political wilderness Mr McCreevy spent very long wondering what he would do if he was finance minister and inflation doubled, savings rates halved and the European Commission started criticising him over his expansionary budgetary stance.

The paucity of the Minister's case - as recorded in the Department of Finance files - is in stark contrast to the well-argued position put forward by his officials. Their main problem is there is no international evidence supporting the contention that incentive-based savings schemes work.

One paper quotes four separate studies. They include a 1994 review by the OECD of various tax and savings regimes in the United States, Canada and Japan which found "that there is no clear evidence that the level of taxation generally affects the overall level of household savings".

Also in 1994, the US Senate Committee on Taxation reached the conclusion that: "empirical investigation on the responsiveness of personal savings to after-tax returns provide no conclusive evidence".

The Department of Finance paper also refers to a study by Summers (a former US Treasury Secretary) and Carroll in 1987 which concluded that the US experience in the 1980s "certainly creates doubt about the ability of economic policy to raise private saving by returns available to savers".

The final authority referred to was studies in the UK on Tax Exempt Special Savings Accounts (TESSAs) and Private Personal Pensions (PPPs) and Personal Equity Plans (PEPs). The research by the Institute of Fiscal Studies in 1996 concluded that "the degree which schemes have succeeded in encouraging new savings or new savers is still open to question". The Department of Finance also raised objections about the potential cost of the scheme and the risk that it would divert money away from private pensions.

Mr McCreevy's biographer - one suspects he will have at least one - may have the opportunity to ask him upon what he based his decision. One hopes that the Minister has an equally impressive amount of research to support his actions.

In the meantime the public can make do with Mr McCreevy's witticisms. Ending the Budget speech which heralded the introduction of the new schemes, Mr McCreevy quoted from Sir Humprey, the loyal civil servants in the TV series Yes Minister, who offered the following advice to his Minister: "To be precise, many things may be done, but nothing must be done for the first time."

Mr McCreevy continued: "It will scarcely surprise that I do not subscribe to this political maxim."

Such glibness does not really substitute for a reasoned, documented and articulated explanation to the tax-payer of actions by the Minister for Finance.