HMRC’s initiative to take the taxpaying system online seems like a good way to ‘move with the times’. Aside from making it more efficient for the taxpayer, one of the key benefits is a saving in HMRC staffing costs. Unfortunately, the planned timing of these job losses during 2014-2015 has had the long term consequence that 3.2 million taxpayers could have paid an incorrect tax bill or be owed a tax rebate.
How could this happen?
A National Audit Office report finds that the staff reduction of 5,500 meant that HMRC customer service “collapsed” during the 2014 -15 tax year. The reason? So HMRC could “live within its budget”. Despite having less people to answer post and phones, taxpayers still needed support to complete their October 2015 paper tax returns. Call waiting times tripled, with queues lasting nearly an hour for some.
The result
Having got rid of the existing customer service staff, HMRC then had to divert staff from other departments to provide an immediate, emergency response. The NAO report states that this meant that HMRC were forced to “defer essential work to maintain PAYE records” – in other words, a backlog of work began to pile up.
The numbers
That’s where we are now – 3.2million “high priority” investigations to carry out to determine if there has been an over, or under payment. In March 2014, there were 2.4million cases needing investigation. By March 2015, this figure reached 4.6million. All because of ‘austerity’ budgeting, poor planning and an absence of forethought.
As reported in The Independent, Which? Director of policy and campaigns, Alex Neill said: “Our research for the last two years has shown just how difficult it can be to get through to HMRC and consumers deserve a big improvement in call waiting times. Until people have viable alternatives to ringing when they need to discuss their tax affairs, many feel they have no choice but to wait. HMRC must continue to work hard to tackle their customer service and reduce call waiting times.”
What HMRC say
HMRC’s director general for customer services, Ruth Owen, responded to the report’s findings: “We recognise that early in 2015 we didn’t provide the standard of service that people are entitled to expect and we apologised at the time. We have since fully recovered and are now offering our best service levels in years. Over the past six months we’ve consistently answered calls in an average of six minutes, and have launched new online tax accounts and webchat for everyone, enabling customers to manage their tax affairs wherever and whenever they want.”
Like most government departments, HMRC do their best when they are often short staffed and over worked. This is always worth remembering if you need to speak to HMRC in the future.
