HMRC bosses were before the Treasury Committee this afternoon.
As AP report HMRC chair Mike Clasper said:
"The area where we have our biggest challenge is that people want to contact us by phone. I'm not happy with the service we have been providing. Our contact centres have been overwhelmed by the number of calls we have had to deal with, dealing with these eight years instead of three years."
They add:
But Mr Clasper denied that the problems were a result of HMRC having its staff numbers cut from 92,000 to 69,000.
Cutting out 23.000 people doesn;t make it harder to find someone to answer the phone? Come on, pull the other one.
As Graham Black of ARC has said, this is from the economics of the playground. Why won't these people admit it? They need more people and the tax yield will rocket.
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your point is almost certainly valid.. but never forget that peoples ability to waffle on with dumb questions they could answer themselves with three seconds of independent research/thought is directly proportional to the number of call-centre staff employed to listen to them.
HMRC just will not admit that they haven’t enough staff. We (the folk who work for them) know it, the Public Accounts Committee knows it, the Treasury Committee knows it, PCS and ARC know it. I find it hard to believe that HMRC’s Executive Committee doesn’t know it. I wish they’d just admit it!
They’re driving people to the internet to compensate for understaffed call centres while closing Enquiry Centres and reducing the opening hours of those which remain open. They forget, or ignore, that not everybody wants to use, or has access to, the internet, and that lots of access will vanish as libraries close. Private debt collecting agencies are taking a cut of collected tax because of understaffing in Debt Management & Banking and thousands of companies are getting away with underpaying thanks to a lack of staff in Local Compliance.
It’s ridiculous. An admission from HMRC that we can’t cope wouldn’t address these problems but would go some way to reassuring staff that management don’t have their heads in the sand.
(I am a PCS rep and am speaking as such, not as an HMRC employee!)
@theboynoodle
My experience of HMRC’s “help lines” is that they are dreadful. I have yet to receive an answer to my queries from a competent person and sometimes I am supplied with complete rubbish. Gone are the days when one could ‘phone the friendly and helpful tax inspector. Nowadays, it seems to be tax illiterate juniors who provide answers.
@Stephen
i’ve actually generally been impressed with their helplines.. both for personal and professional matters. there are issues and frustrations.. but no moreso than with any large organisation… and far better than many. given that they do seem to have had to lessen the quality of ‘first-line’ staff (with no disrespect at all meant) i think they do well. if i call HMRC i don’t want to speak to a tax inspector unless and until it’s been determined that i need to. i just want the structure and resource in place so that i do get to the right person eventually.
@theboynoodle – you probably were always talking to juniors when you rang your local office – the difference being in the old days, that before i was let loose on PAYE taxpayers i would have been subject to 2 years training not the 6 or so weeks that the operators in call centres get. These poor buggers have to follow an on screen menu that is hopeless – you theoretically need no knowledge of PAYE whatsoever to answer a call. Apart from losing large numbers of trained Inspectors – who could afford to take early retirement – and who could blame them , HMRC have lost large swathes of skilled clerical workers and junior managers that were the backbone of the Revenue. Now you are stuck with a few of us old timers and lots of barely trained phone jockeys. It really is pitiful now. Morale has fallen through the floor. If I could afford to retire I would be jumping ship like so many of my colleagues. As it is I struggle on hampered by hopeless computer systems, increasingly byzantine and confusing iniatives and rules and management by diktat.
@bob
The tax profession is almost entirely critical of HMRC service standards, and rightly so
But I don’t blame the people at HMRC
The is the result of the Treasury’s ‘economics of the playground’
@Richard Murphy
I know that Richard and i thank you for your support , but however bad you think it is – it’s worse. I can’t begin to describe the things I see on a daily basis and how much tax loss we ignore compared to a few years ago.