Even with the extra resources HMRC added to the helpline and the addition of a twitter account @HMRCcustomers. 890,000 taxpayers still missed the deadline.
Having looked at taxpayers comments on social media, it was still extremely difficult to actually get through on the helpline having to wait for well over of 15 minutes, with some not actually being able to get through at all. Whilst twitter also answered a lot of queries, it didn’t answer every single question that was tweeted. The twitter account was also for general queries only, therefore was no help to those with complex queries.
Should HMRC shoulder some of the blame for this? It is well known that HMRC’s systems need a significant improvement and it is not acceptable keeping someone on the phone for over 15 minutes to get through and in ever increasing cases cutting off the caller before they are able to speak to anyone. Should HMRC be more accessible, a good portion of those taxpayers who have missed the deadline may well not have done had they managed to seek the advice they needed from HMRC’s helpline.
Though, HMRC can’t take all the blame. After all the taxpayer has nearly 10 months to submit their self-assessment tax return, so why do so many leave it until the last minute? It does seem to be a cultural thing that we tend to leave everything until the last minute in the UK and we have all been guilty of it in the past.
We must all know now that HMRC are hard to contact, particularly during busy periods, so maybe we should make things easy on ourselves and prepare and submit our tax returns early?
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