More than 600 people employed in the island’s fulfilment sector will have to wait until next month to see whether a BBC Guernsey report that could affect their jobs is correct or not.

What cannot be confirmed this weekend is whether the station has some new material suggesting a government move to end the VAT exemption on low value exports from the island or whether it is simply rehashing a UK Treasury release from last July.

Commerce and Employment locally has no fresh evidence of a major push by the UK, but the industry here is nervous and is awaiting the Chancellor’s March Budget statement with some trepidation.

If the BBC is correct, then the UK might announce that it is scrapping the low value consignment relief on VAT, although how that would work is unclear given that this is an EU-wide exemption designed to save countries the cost of collecting small amounts of tax.

More concerning, however, would be that any action would be taken against all the evidence.

The relief is entirely legal and is there because the EU wanted it to be. It is regulated locally to stop cynical exploitation and exporters would move to other areas if closed here.

More importantly, it does not cause the harm claimed by British CD and DVD retailers, whose businesses are actually damaged by the onshore supermarkets, who use music as a loss leader, rather than by these islands.

So harmful action by the UK would be a triumph of ignorance over fact and an acknowledgement that the government is prepared to act against what powerful lobbies don’t like rather than what is actually wrong.

For a Crown Dependency in the low tax, offshore financial services arena, that’s gravely worrying.

It also questions the wisdom of the regulatory regime here, designed to appease the EU by constantly tightening the screw at the expense of local jobs growth and, some fear, ultimately the sector itself.

If the BBC is correct, then the chief minister’s call for Guernsey to remain in the vanguard of more inventive and punishing financial services regulation will look misplaced indeed.