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PAC concerned HMRC has “sought to degrade” customer service

Committee’s scathing report is simply the latest to raise concerns over declining service levels

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has accused HMRC of having “sought to degrade its telephone service” in its latest report, covering the 2023/24 reporting year, as customer service levels have “deteriorated even further”.

From 6th April 2023 to 5th April 2024, the tax office answered around two-thirds of customer calls. According to the PAC, this is an “all-time low”, with HMRC having “last met an annual target for its telephone services in 2017/18”.

Average waiting times for customer calls also soared to 23 minutes, while thousands more waited as long as 70 minutes to speak to an adviser. In the first 11 months of the reporting period, HMRC cut off more than 43,600 callers who waited over 70 minutes – without “prior warning” and with no automatic call-back service.

This has “damaged trust in the tax system”, and HMRC “must take responsibility for its own failings”, the Committee says.

 

Findings and recommendations from 2023/24

The Public Accounts Committee is a cross-parliamentary group that scrutinises the value for money that government projects, programmes and services deliver.

In previous assessments of HMRC, the Committee has pulled no punches in its conclusions. In its latest report, available in full here, it has highlighted its key concerns and recommendations:

Longer call waiting times and more calls cut off
To rebuild trust among taxpayers, the PAC has suggested HMRC “reinstate a call waiting time target”, and “ensure it gives customers accurate estimates of call waiting times in real time”. The PAC also says HMRC must “not cut off customers without warning”.

HMRC must outline its digital transformation roadmap
As more taxpayers are dragged into the system due to “freezing tax thresholds”, the PAC is “concerned that performance will deteriorate again if HMRC struggles to meet further increases in demand”. As such, it wants HMRC to publish a ‘digital roadmap’, to “set out the digital services it is expecting to develop and the investment it needs”.

Find a solution to reduce paperwork and postage
In 2022/23, the tax authority received “22m items of correspondence”, with “approximately 70%” of this volume arriving by post, which “requires scanning, manual entry into HMRC’s systems, or both”. In the same year, HMRC spent £68m on postage.

As such, the PAC wants HMRC to “prioritise introducing systems for customers to submit files and send secure messages electronically to HMRC”. This should generate savings that can be used to improve customer service across the board.

HMRC’s Harra fires back at PAC

The PAC report drew the ire of HMRC’s CEO, Sir Jim Harra, who wrote to the Committee to “refute these claims in the strongest terms”.

In his letter, dated 21st January, Harra said he was “disturbed” by the PAC’s claims, which “expressly contradict” the evidence provided by himself and colleagues at an evidence session in November last year.

Harra argued that “HMRC has always deployed its available resources to maximise its performance across all customer services channels”. He also claimed the authority has “made strong progress towards meeting our telephony and correspondence service standards, and wait times have reduced”.

This sparked a reply from Sir Clinton-Brown, the Chair of the Committee, who reiterated the importance of HMRC putting “customers’ needs at the heart of its decision-making”.

Highlighting the “long-term decline in customer service performance”, he said the PAC findings were “reasonable”, rebutting the “selectively quoted figures” Harra provided, describing them as a “potentially unrepresentative snapshot” and “not sufficiently complete or persuasive”.

1 Comment

  • It’s time Jim Harra stepped down. PAC is only reporting on what most tax office “customers” have been seeing and feeling for years now. To try to deny this, based on homework they have marked themselves, shows a remarkable lack of understanding and will to improve.

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