HMRC Ambition: The £1.5m slogan civil servants spent your hard-earned tax on

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Civil servants spent nearly £1.5million on brainstorming away days to create a slogan for HM Revenue and Customs - and came up with just two words.

After three meetings to "rebrand" the department, the best that 450 of the taxman's top staff could come up with was "HMRC Ambition".

Among the rejected ideas were a "pink and fluffy" logo spelling out "Thank You" to those who paid their taxes and a steel-grey "Elite Enforcement" title warning tax evaders they would be "hunted down".

After selecting HMRC Ambition, which has been used on internal documents, managers then put together a "mission statement" to inspire staff.

HMRC, which last year lost the details of 25million child benefit claimants, spent £1.34million on the meetings in 2006, according to a reply to a written parliamentary question from the Liberal Democrats.

LibDem spokesman Danny Alexander said: "People will be astonished that hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money was spent on this bureaucratic exercise.

"After the lost data debacle, I can think of lots of other words other than 'pink and fluffy' or 'ambition' for the HMRC."

An HMRC spokesman said: "If you improve the quality and leadership in the department it benefits everyone from people who claim tax credits to the Government."