Tax and accountancy bodies have completed a survey of HMRC’s service levels with some uncomfortable findings: well over a third of calls to HMRC are unproductive. The data harvested sets a new baseline standard for improvement and, future monitoring has now been established.
A report, ‘Tackling HMRC’s customer service challenge’, published this week is the fruits of a review of HMRC’s service levels under a joint initiative between the Chartered Institute of Taxation (CIOT) and Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW).
31 agent firms took part in a six week study, recording their experiences of contacting HMRC, the advice received and the outcomes. Their data has been combined and analysed and the two institutes have made ten recommendations for practical improvements to the way that HMRC can improve its digital services.
Highlights of the survey's findings include:
- HMRC could save £36m: an estimate that HMRC could save £36m per year by eliminating ‘progress-chasing’ calls. These represent over one-third of all calls to HMRC by agents. Elimination of this type of call alone could save over 1.7million hours of HMRC call handlers’ time each year, equivalent to around 1,000 full-time employees at an employer cost of £36m.
- Calls to chase a repayment and amend a tax return represent a further 1/3 of calls.
- Most agent contact with HMRC on technical issues did not fully resolve the underlying issue, often due to the HMRC adviser’s insufficient technical knowledge.
- Satisfaction with HMRC’s web-chat has reached an all-time low.
Whilst the report does not estimate of the cost of poor service levels to agents, taxpayers and the overall impact on the wider economy. It may be deduced from the report’s findings that 2/3rds of calls to HMRC are on three fundamental issues: progress chasing, chasing refunds, amending tax returns.
There are also more fundamental problems noted with HMRC’s systems:
- ‘Legacy’ IT systems that do not join up.
- Agent services accounts that do not allow access to vital taxpayer data.
The tax bodies offer ten recommendations to HMRC:
- Introduce an external tracking mechanism to tackle progress chasing and reduce contact.
- Review and improve internal tracking mechanisms to tackle lost correspondence, inconsistencies and repetition, saving time.
- Ensure there are appropriate routes to escalate complex cases to help resolve problems more effectively without prolonged and repeated interaction with HMRC customer service.
- Improve individual ownership of work to improve resolution rates, building trust and reducing further contact.
- Improve education and training of HMRC staff to increase consistency and resolution rates, building trust and reducing ‘answer shopping’ by getting things right first time.
- Invest in customer service staffing to increase capacity and output, easing the burden on existing HMRC customer service staff and reducing backlogs and delays.
- Maintain investment in legacy systems to ensure that taxpayers and agents who have no choice but to use legacy systems receive a sufficient level of customer service and functionality.
- Identify and plug gaps in digital services to ensure HMRC’s investment is targeted at making meaningful changes to the digital services that taxpayers and agents want and need.
- Increase the use of secure email for agent communication to help meet agent demand for digital communications.
- Co-create and continually improve digital services by working collaboratively with taxpayers and agents to better inform design and testing, and make vital changes post-implementation to ensure digital systems work.
At the Autumn Budget 2024 the Government pledged to invest £1.7bn over the next five years to recruit an additional 5,000 HMRC compliance staff and 1,800 HMRC debt management staff.
The tax bodies intend to undertake the survey on an annual basis, fingers crossed that we will all see marked improvements in HMRC services by next year.
External links
CIOT and ICAEW report – Tackling HMRC’s customer service challenge
