In keeping with the "phone" theme this week, my thanks to a loyal reader who dropped me a wee note yesterday about the time he spent on the phone trying to get through to HMRC:
"I have just spent one hour and fifteen minutes on the phone to HMRC listening to a voice saying 'we will be with you as soon as possible'.Please let us know if your MP offers you any advice or assistance.
I gave up !
I tried to phone them yesterday I got through, listened to the options for ten minutes and was then told please ring back as we are too busy!
I have just sent an email to my local MP on the matter, I look forward to his reply."
Has anyone had to wait longer than this to get through?
Tax does have to be taxing.
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The reason theres nobody answering the phones is because theres so many nonsense offline jobs taking up so much time & they are completely obsessed with patronising and bullying their staff to try and get the staff quota down for the government before the mass redundancies start.
ReplyDeleteAnswering the phones to the public is just a sideline annoyance to the so called management.
Run a business - i wouldnt trust most of them to run a bath.
You got it in one. The tax payer (aka customer to the ass licking fraternity)just get in the way of the stats that mismanagement thrive on. Ken I dont know your take on the RTI being tested on volunteer companies this tax year but the feeling in the trenches is that when it goes live in a year or so it will be a total nightmare.
ReplyDeleteThere are over 4 million employers in the UK. The RTI Pilot is running with just a handful. I gather even by October 2012 the number will have only been increased to a couple of thousand. This is still only about 0.05% of the total. The plans seem to suggest that over 99% of employers are going to be brought into the scheme from April-October 2013. This is a challenging timetable to put it mildly.
DeleteMore worryingly the number of employee record being processed each year is going to balloon from about 25 million annual returns to in excess of 500 million weekly or monthly returns. This is going to put a great deal of pressure on HMRC already creaking IT systems. In particular the need for data to flow through the system on a relatively short cycle (ie weekly or monthly rather than annually) means that any failures in the application will lead to back logs of returns building up quite quickly. Once that happens the system may struggle ever to recover.
On the face of it RTI has potential disaster written all over it. However, this probably wont happen until after the pilot using a few carefully selected employers has been declared a success. Expect everyone involved tom jump ship at that stage before it hits the iceberg and sinks with all hands.
Does six hours over two days to make an appointment with my local HMRC office count?
ReplyDelete(Whence-upon I was insulted by the HMRC member of staff wandering about the office talking to her colleagues... and yes I complained).