The Quality of Service to Personal Taxpayers inquiry
Closed
What the inquiry looked at
“HM Revenue & Customs' (HMRC) mission is to collect the money that pays for the UK's public services and help families and individuals with targeted financial support. It aims to administer the tax system in the most simple, customer focused and efficient way, helping the honest majority to get their tax right. Taxpayers pay around £270 billion a year in income tax and national insurance, around half of all tax revenue. Many people who pay income tax do not need to engage with HMRC on a regular basis. Most income tax (86%) is collected from employees under Pay-As-You-Earn (PAYE) and administered by employers. The remaining 14% of taxpayers who are self-employed or have other income sources are required to assess their own tax liabilities. During the last five years, the National Audit Office and the Committee of Public Accounts have reported several times on HMRC's customer service. In 2013, the Committee of Public Accounts expressed concern that the prospects of fewer staff and more calls were a real risk to HMRC achieving acceptable standards of service. The NAO report will look at what HMRC has done to improve performance since the NAO last reported in 2012, and how HMRC plans to improve customer service and seek to understand whether the quality of HMRC's customer service might affect tax revenue.”
The committee's words, from the inquiry page on parliament.uk ↗.
What it found
Customer service levels collapsed in 2014–15 and early 2015–16 as a result of HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) underestimating the demand for telephone contact and reducing customer service capacity by releasing 5,600 staff. Average call waiting times tripled compared with previous levels, transferring an unreasonable cost to taxpayers.
Waiting times only recovered towards the end of 2015 after the recruitment of 2400 new staff but HMRC’s plans to cut the cost of its personal tax services by another 34% in the next five years raise the risk of another collapse in service levels. HMRC needs a clear understanding of customer behaviour to estimate how demand will change and must be confident that it can maintain service levels at an acceptable level before it releases further staff.
In January 2015, the previous Committee concluded that HMRC demonstrated little appreciation of the scale of the challenge it faced in replacing its Aspire IT contract, which provides its major tax collection systems. The Committee was concerned that the move to a new model of IT could bring substantial risks to tax collection and customer service. HMRC is now better placed to replace the Aspire contract and is doing so in phases which allows it to better manage the operational and technical risks. However, HMRC still has important decisions to take, and work to do. The next two years are crucial to HMRC’s ability to move to a new IT model from 2020 which lowers cost, supports improvements in customer service and protects tax revenue. Continuity in programme leadership will significantly improve HMRC’s chances of success. We will continue to track this programme.
What the government said
No government response is linked to this report.
How the inquiry ran
Each dot is a dated item listed on this page, from the inquiry's opening on 28 April 2016 to its close on 4 January 2018.
- Oral evidence 13 Jun 2016
- Report 27 Jul 2016
What it recommended
The committee's recommendations are not listed here yet. Read them in 13th Report - Quality of service to personal taxpayers and replacing the Aspire contract ↗ on parliament.uk.
Evidence
Oral evidence sessions 1
- 13 Jun 2016No witnesses recordedparliament.uk ↗