The National Audit Office has issued a damning report on HM Revenue & Customs telephone support services, saying:
Customers cumulatively spent 798 years on hold waiting to speak with HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) in 2022-23 – more than double the time spent waiting in 2019-20, according to a new National Audit Office (NAO) report on the tax collector's customer service.
As they note:
HMRC's strategy is to encourage customers to turn to its digital services first so that queries can be resolved quickly and easily online. This is intended to cut costs servicing telephone calls and correspondence, as well as free up staff to serve people who need extra support.
However, it is not clear how far and fast digital will reduce demand for telephone and correspondence services. Digital services are better suited for straightforward queries and reporting changes in customers' circumstances.
They add:
HMRC has not yet done enough to raise awareness of its digital services, increase customers' confidence in using its online offering or understand how effectively these services meet customers' needs.
At this juncture they begin to note what I think to be the key issue here:
The move to digital service has not eased pressure on traditional services as much as HMRC expected. The quality of service provided by HMRC telephone and correspondence has been far below the levels expected in recent years, and has not met annual targets.
While the total number of telephone calls has reduced, the total amount of time advisers are spending on each call has increased. This means HMRC's workload has reduced more slowly than reductions in call volumes. More taxpayers hold multiple jobs, meaning they have less straightforward needs, while fiscal drag has also brought more people into the tax system.
In despair (it would seem) they record that:
With HMRC's call-handling workload falling less than expected, it has not been able to make all the staff reductions it planned. Due to budgetary constraints, it now needs to cut staff numbers by 14% in 2024-25, despite only achieving a 9% reduction between 2019-20 and 2023-24.
In other words, at this point the NAO have finally come to the point of their report. The issue is not that the service has failed - when it very clearly has. Instead, the issue is that HMRC has not been able to cut staff as quickly as the government would like. The withdrawal of a government service that previously benefitted people is not progressing as planned. The NAO's response is:
The NAO recommends that HMRC develops more realistic plans for cutting the services it is replacing with digital channels and adopts a more customer-focused approach to encourage the take-up of new services.
HMRC should also reduce avoidable and expensive forms of contact, for example by increasing opportunities for customers to send correspondence and documentation through secure electronic networks, and learn from the implementation of its digital projects.
Or to put it another (unstated) way, HMRC should stop forcing people to communicate in ways that do not let them secure the answers they need and should instead talk to them them in ways that do actually work by meeting taxpayer needs.
There was a time when the Inland Revenue (as it then was) might have been a tax enforcement agency but it also understood that its task was also to be a customer service, seeking to help those who wished to be tax compliant to pay the right amount of tax at the right time. Neoliberal government thinking by both the Tories and Labour destroyed that idea of service, creating a department dedicated to outsourcing the risk of error to the taxpayer by denying them the help they need whilst simultaneously seeking to minimise the number of staff engaged, all with the goal of reducing the cost of collecting tax.
The result has been the destruction of value, including a loss of confidence in government itself.
If HMRC was wise it would heed the warnings it has been given. But to help it the NAO should have delivered a clearer message. They should have made clear that the message is that worried people in need of help need to talk to other people. They do not want computer generated answers that rarely give them the information they need. In summary, we have found the limits of the digital world. There is still a need for human beings. HMRC should acknowledge the fact. They might collect a lot more tax if they did.
There is much more on this in chapter 15.4 of the Taxing Wealth Report.
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It’s indeed important that people get the info they need and often the designers of self-help systems seem not to have spent much time discovering that their own guesses about what people want to know are often not representative and also frequently not comprehensive enough. A further persistent issue with HMRC nowadays is that the language used is not very clear. It’s all very well giving information but if you can’t check out that you’ve understood it or there’s no way to find out the definition of a particular term within the tax discourse, then you’re stuffed.
An online help service needs to be ‘grown’ not imposed and assumed to be sufficient.
I’ve had to interact with HMRC in the last few years. I’ve found the process very confusing and concerning. I am currently waiting for correspondence for an online request submitted at the end of April to withdraw the request for a tax return for the previous tax year and remove me from self assessment. Their online counter (which is not shown when you complete the form, but is on a completely separate page) says I will need to wait until 30th September to receive their decision by post.
Good luck
A quick calculation, assuming £20/hr is the cost to people wait, shows 798 years is equivalent to £140 million!
As usual the government is externalising it’s costs and decreasing productivity over all.
£140 million would go quite some way to improving the efficiency of the HMRC.
On the basis that increasing HMRC funding by £1 billion would increase the tax take by £10 billion then, one might argue, that wasting £140 million is equivalent to forgoing £1.4 billion of revenue.
As previously, if only the government unwound the multitude of false economies there would be very much more resource for public goods.
True….
Communication with HMRC is appalling. I thought a dispute I had with them had been resolved over three years ago. Then last year they came back to me with the same demand. I called their collections department but was told I had to contact another office. Phoning was a complete waste of time as I was just waiting to get through so I wrote to them. That was last October. No reply as yet.
Good luck
My record is just over two years for a reply….
I am highly computer literate,but for the reasons you illustrate (I have several jobs) and the fact the current online system is very limited in what you can do, I cannot resolve my queries without phoning and waiting nearly an hour each time. I discovered a completely wrong job and pay details posted to y record and so far have made 2 calls to try and get this rectified. There was no way to do this online.
The current tax return system is not particularly user friendly and I believe there will always be queries that need expert assistance that cannot be resolved through the standard system. Given there are now no local tax offices we must have a functioning and more responsive helpline. The idea with such a complex system that many pensioners are now being drawn into can be run without any human interaction is farcical. Thankfully most operators are very helpful once you eventually get through.
A friend recently spent almost an entire day on the phone trying to buy extra years of National Insurance (a task that incidentally cannot be completed online on the DWP website). The task is still not complete. He wanted to give the Government thousands of pounds, and the system made that almost impossible.
“the total number of telephone calls has reduced”.
There is a universal Neoliberal theme here. I would call it the Digital Bonus for Business. It has been proved to be effective and profitable for the Banks. How do you eliminate costs, improve profits and take advantage of a major business advantage; insulate yourself from the inconvenience of bleating customers whom you have let-down or ripped-off?
The banks are rapidly reducing the number of branches. Here is how it is done. Close branches, make them more difficult to use; make all your systems, like telephone services slow, cumbersome and difficult to use if you do not use the digital offer. If a customer can find a branch open and use it; a staff member will meet the recalcitrant immediately, and try to oblige him/her to use a digital keypad and screen in the branch, rather than speak to someone. The branch is a schoolroom for digital banking. The bank will then demonstrate from the record of closed branches and reduced usage of branches still open, that customers do not use branches any longer, or want to use them. It is a ‘hostile environment’ policy to branches. It is now commonplace in Government and business. The easiest way for management bereft of new business ideas to increase profits, is to cut costs any way they can. Digital is the bet option to execute very bad ideas. There is a big saving in sunk costs, employee costs, and a transfer of business risk through self-service customer used technology. And the customer will find it increasingly difficult to speak to a bank employee or challenge the service offered face-to -face.
Here is the silent big business-risk benefit to banks of branch closures. How did the ordinary public widely realise they were in a real banking crisis in 2008? When the queues formed in the street at Northern Rock branches. How will they find out when the next financial crisis strikes?
You tell me.
Much to agree with
Yes. I recently helped a friend, who is dyslexic and does not have a computer, to close an account at Barclays which you can’t do online anyway. I was told that the branch was closing in a couple of weeks time. There was a long queue of people waiting to be served, so the excuse that the branch is not used is just not true. When I was the Company Secretary for a coach operator who banked at Barclays that branch was incredibly busy, though admittedly I don’t suppose it’s the same these days.
As for HMRC I’m so pleased I retired from practicing as an accountant 10 years ago. The highly efficient office in Bournemouth had closed some time before, and the VAT office in Poole has been raised to the ground. In the final years I had a particularly tricky case to deal with and had to go to London to sort it out with an inspector.
It’s not only HMRC – its all the big suppliers – energy, banks, insurance companies, other financial services suppliers, – whose customers talk to ‘You and Yours’ on radio 4. The cost in wasted time and effort must be hundreds of millions.
The move to online chatbots and form – filling, – the new digital technology – which in principle could be used to ease the flow of information between customer and supplier and to empower the customer – giving them all the information they need – including the current status of any query – , instead has been used to enhance the power of the big company supplier over the customer. This has made the consumer feel even more of a supplicant or a serf – rather than the ’empowered consumer’ of perfect market theory.
As with the HMRC, it is now harder or even impossible for customers to know what they need to know, and to discuss their query with a human being – even about money being erroneously deducted from their bank accounts or credit cards.
Surely there should be an enforceable ‘consumer communications charter’ – along the following lines?
1. Provide a prominent email address, SMS number, a telephone number, and postal address for customers to send a query, to complain, or reply to communications.
2. On the login or home page a prominent contact button for queries and complaints, – at least as prominent as the buttons asking for customer sign up to deals or services.
3. A maximum wait time for telephone calls – of five minutes and a ring back within an hour if busy . A maximum response time to a postal enquiry.
4. A full ‘log book’ record of all communications, and conversations, between the customer and the provider stored by the provider and retrievable by the customer during any further communications. This will avoid the customer having to re-tell his/her story multiple times.
5. No unilateral withdrawals from the customers bank account unless agreed with the customer recorded on the log book.
6. Any chat options to be clearly stated whether it is a bot or a live person.
7 The bot or person to have sight of the log book of past communications for reference during the chat.
etc etc.
That would be good…
I think that Ian’s suggestion is the basis for a campaign. Something like that should indeed be part of a public service minimum for any customer service operation, public or private. How do we go about it?
Outsourcing of public services to private companies has one, and only one aim: to maximise profits.
One way to do this is to reduce (a) the number of services offered (b) the quality of those services (as they reduce costs).
What seems to be missing is guaranteed service levels. These are a requirement for public services with the passing on 20 July 2023, of the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act became law. There is no onus (at all) on private companies.
So neoliberalism raises its ugly head again, the public sector takes all the risk, the private sector takes all the profit. There is a reason that the name Troy is derived from “robber that is noted for outrages and cruelty”. Labour seem to want a cut of the action.
“Digital Service” is right up there with “Military Intelligence” as a near perfect Oxymoron.
If it means anything at all it means you are dealing with a Monopoly/Cartel that has decided to withdraw a real service in order to cut costs and make bigger profits, or in the case of the public sector to withdraw a real service while maintaining the complete lie that they are making improvements.
My experience of twenty years working in the Software industry, with many contacts with the senior management of businesses and occasional contact with management in public services, is that most of them had very unrealistic expectations of how people interact with IT systems.
Unfortunately, these are the people, together with equally ignorant politicians, who are making fundamental decisions about how are society will work in the future.
The message coming through loud and clear where ever you encounter “Digital Service” is, we don’t know, we don’t want to know and we don’t care.
Needless to say I am generally sceptical about management Guru’s however when we went over to John Seddons ‘Vanguard’ method of working it was a revelation with minimising the amount of ‘waste’ in Customer Contact.
Needless to say when he offered to help the DWP design a system for customer contact with Universal Credit the DWP said no with predictable results.
People face 23-minute wait for HMRC helplines @ BBC News, 15 May 2024
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cv2x2459e2xo
Lest we forget.
What follows is not about the lack of response from HMRC, but about the same principle on a larger, tragic canvas, comprised of the failure by those with the means, to impose a just conclusion to the conflict in Palestine.
Today is an anniversary. Some have not forgotten.
https://jewishcurrents.org/newsletter/readings-for-nakba-day?token=96U42MJ8Y2j5W9DAv8HISjb0PDsURrcu