Richard Wild
Head of Tax Technical, Chartered Institute of Taxation
April will mark 20 years since HMRC was formed by the merger of HM Customs and Excise (C&E) and the Inland Revenue (IR).
I worked in C&E at Thomas Paine House (TPH) in Angel, London, at the time. TPH, like hundreds of other premises, is no longer a tax office. Many of those around at the time may look back misty-eyed to the ‘good old days’ of local tax offices that you could visit for help, when agents knew their local tax inspectors by name.
Persistent HMRC challenges
The move to regional centres, increased digitalisation and growing complexity, have increasingly put pressure on HMRC. However, customer service challenges are not a new phenomenon. Five years post-merger, customer service slumped with HMRC handling just 48% of calls, largely due to problems implementing the National Insurance and PAYE Service.1 Ten years post-merger, post was the problem, with just 52% being turned around within 15 days.2
Good HMRC customer service
is critical to tax compliance.
Our customer service study
Our members continued to tell us (see CIOT survey into HMRC’s service levels, 2023) that good HMRC customer service is critical to tax compliance, the ability to do business and trust in the tax system. This led to the Chartered Institute of Taxation (CIOT) joining forces with ICAEW in 2024 to consider how to address HMRC’s customer service challenges (see our full report: ‘Tackling HMRC’s customer service challenge’)
We analysed the experiences of 31 firms from 634 telephone or webchat interactions with HMRC leading to 10 recommendations for change,3 based on three themes:
- The ability to track queries and correspondence: thus eliminating the need to phone HMRC to confirm safe receipt and track progress (which represented over one-third of the calls recorded), and escalate and resolve complex cases effectively.
- Improving the quality of service provided by HMRC: ensuring HMRC staff take ownership of work, are equipped with the right knowledge and tools to resolve matters and ensure HMRC are resourced adequately.
- Capitalising on good digitalisation: plugging gaps where digital systems and communications don’t exist or work properly, co-create new digital systems in conjunction with their users and maintain the functionality of legacy systems in the meantime.
Perhaps in another 20 years, if these recommendations are implemented, HMRC customer service issues may be a thing of the past.
[1] HM Revenue & Customs. 2011. Annual Report and Accounts 2010-11.
[2] HM Revenue & Customs. 2016. Annual Report and Accounts 2015-16.
[3] CIOT and ICEAW report, 2024, Tackling HMRC’s customer service challenge.
