The Revenue and Customs Prosecutions Office (RCPO) is to merge with the Crown Prosecution Service four years after it was set up, in a move to save public money and improve efficiency.

The Attorney General, Lady Scotland QC (pictured), announced the change following a review of the Law Officers’ Department.

The merger will take place during 2009-2010. As a transitional step David Green QC, RCPO’s director, will lead a ring-fenced service for HMRC prosecutions within the service.

A spokesman for the Attorney General’s Office said: ‘We intend to manage staff moves in an organised and rational way to ensure that expertise is retained and that vacancies are filled from existing resources wherever possible.’

RCPO was launched in April 2005 following two government reviews into the failure of high-profile customs cases. It prosecutes cases investigated by HMRC and the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), including tax fraud, drug smuggling and money laundering.

The organisation, which deals with around 1,300 cases a year, has cost £35m each year since it came into being and has confiscated a total of £75m.

Kennedy Talbot, a barrister at 33 Chancery Lane, said there was nothing wrong with merging the organisations in principle to reduce overheads, so long as specialist departments are retained to prosecute complicated revenue evasion work, such as missing traded and carousel-type frauds.

Stephen Parkinson, head of the criminal and regulatory practice at City firm Kingsley Napley, said he supports the change, which he said was inevitable from the outset of the RCPO. ‘It will end the structural confusion that has existed with both organisations doing SOCA prosecutions, and create a more focused service,’ he said.