More than £430 million has been paid out in redundancy payments to civil servants as part of a Whitehall efficiency drive.
The payments include £1.1 million shared by two senior Treasury officials, figures obtained by the Liberal Democrats showed.
Liberal Democrat spokesman Lord Oakeshott said: "No business that runs its redundancy programme like this would last 10 minutes."
The payments totalling £432 million went to 7,718 staff made redundant as part of Sir Peter Gershon's review of public sector spending.
Lord Oakeshott obtained the figures in a series of Parliamentary questions but the real cost could be higher because two of the biggest departments, the Ministry of Defence and the Home Office, could not give details of their redundancy payouts.
Lord Oakeshott said: "The Government has thrown half a billion pounds of taxpayers' cash at civil servants to pay them not to work. The costs to the taxpayer are only too clear.
"The benefits are vague and stretching into the future. No business that runs its redundancy programme like this would last 10 minutes.
"Two treasury bigwigs really hit the jackpot, splitting over a million pounds between them. Did 67 senior managers at the Treasury really deserve golden goodbyes averaging over £220,000 each, on top of their generous pensions?
"The Home Office and MoD are totally incompetent for failing to give answers, when other big departments can give us these vital figures.
"No wonder the Home Office loses track of who to deport if it can't even count its own redundancies. The MoD doesn't seem to have a clue what 19,000 non-retiring leavers have cost the taxpayer."
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