Treasury has the youngest officials
"Work with some of the country's brightest people." That's the slogan enticing job applicants on the recruitment pages of the Treasury's website.
So the clever folk running the nation's finances are clearly not keen on modesty - but are they lacking in maturity?
The Treasury is the government department with the youngest staff on average.
This has been established by a BBC Freedom of Information survey, which discovered that the average age of Treasury officials was just 35.
In contrast, at the other end of the spectrum, the averages for the Ministry of Defence and the Department of Work and Pensions are 47 and 48 respectively.
These facts will confirm the doubts of some of the Treasury's critics, who distrust its influence at the heart of Whitehall.
A few weeks ago, the former cabinet minister Iain Duncan Smith said that the Treasury was "the worst thing we have in Britain".
During his time in government as work and pensions secretary, he clashed repeatedly with the Treasury over his plans to change benefits policy.
Lack of expertise
In his recent remarks, Mr Duncan Smith complained the Treasury was too powerful, dominated by junior civil servants who moved jobs every two years and had no collective memory, adding: "The average age in the Treasury is 27."
He might have been exaggerating that detail, but there was a point behind his assertions.
In 2012, the Treasury published a review of how it had handled the 2007-09 international financial crisis.
This identified youthfulness, inexperience, short job tenure and lack of expertise as some of the organisational factors that had hampered the department's capability to respond fully to the economic calamities of the time.
"There's a reality to this, but it's wrong to say the Treasury is not addressing it," says Julian McCrae, of the Institute of Government, which has conducted its own analysis of other age profile data about the civil service.
"The Treasury recruits bright young officials, but they then move on.
"Some of this is to do with pay levels.
"It admits it has too much turnover, but it's working hard to improve skills and capability."
This table gives the mean age for staff in each government department, as obtained by the BBC's Freedom of Information requests.
|Average age of staff in government departments|
|Attorney General's Office||39|
|Energy and Climate Change||39|
|Culture, Media and Sport||40|
|Communities and Local Government||43|
|Business, Innovation and Skills||44|
|Environment, Food and Rural Affairs||44|
|Northern Ireland Office||44|
|Work and Pensions||48|
The bright young people at the Treasury did not respond to a request for comment.
- You can follow Martin Rosenbaum on Twitter as @rosenbaum6