HMRC has sacked thousands of its staff in the last year. All of them did invaluable work collecting the tax that might prevent austerity, preserve the NHS, pay pensions and improve the quality of people's lives. They also kept the tax system working.
This is the result of that reckless policy, taken from a report published by HMRC this morning:
Post handling at HMRC appears to have effectively collapsed. HMRC admit that this is in part because they moved staff to handling tax credit renewals. They also claim that they are receiving less post, as if this is an excuse. But it isn't. This is simply an organisation that is now so under-resourced that it is at breaking point. And the UK can emphatically not afford a broken HMRC for all the reasons I explain here.
When will this stupidity end?
And when will we get an Office for Tax Responsibility to monitor this sort of nonsense that HMRC produces?
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As an adviser with the CAB I can tell you that answering the post is the least of HMRC’s performance issues. Have you tried getting through on the phone? If you have, as I do on numerous occasions for clients, they subject you to the following: 1. a merry-go-round on the telephone menu so that you never get to the person you need to speak to and they kick you out of the system with a blunt “goodbye”. 2. The phone just keeps ringing – 30 minutes is my maximum and then of course time makes you give up. 3. Cutting you off in mid sentence. 4. Not being able to answer your question and then putting you through to somebody else and you get back on the 1-3 cycle as above! Mind you, we manage as a country to evict people who cannot afford to pay the bedroom tax with great speed and efficiency!
Agreed
It’s not the staff’s fault
Answer rate is 75%
BUT the staff have not been given enough training
You can’t learn tax in 12 weeks
Terence, you probably know this already but this poor service is actually deliberate: it is aimed at moving ‘customers’ to a self serve model via digital channels. HMRC ran down and then closed all the enquiry centres to prevent people being able to discuss their tax affairs with properly trained staff face to face; and now they are operating a deliberately under-resourced phone line service to force them onto the internet. Don’t get me wrong, many people like to deal with their affairs on-line, and this is a service that needs to be offered and continually enhanced; however, as everyone knows, there are times you really need to actually speak to someone knowledgable; and HMRC is no longer interested in meeting that need.
To quote Professor John Seddon in his evidence to the Treasury select committee:
“HMRC’s failure should be a lesson in how not to conduct public-service reform
HMRC is the flagship of UK public-sector reform. Its astonishingly bad results should be read as urgent warning signals — which unfortunately they are not, since to do so would be to fatally undermine the current narrative or set of beliefs/ideologies of the ‘reformers’. The shortcomings are the consequence of poor organisation design, which, in turn, is based on flawed but conventional thinking. HMRC should give pause to all who believe in industrialising the public sector; it is a profound source of knowledge about what not to do.”
link:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmselect/cmtreasy/memo/hmrc/27.htm
Thanks
HMRC is a very sick organisation. it is addicted to self-harm; it just keeps on cutting itself.