Wednesday 4 September 2013

HMRC's Customer Service

HMRC recently published its half yearly briefing entitled "How are we doing? HMRC's April to June 2013 performance".

It blames less than stellar customer service levels (we are not "customers"!) on the extra work caused by RTI.

That being said HMRC brought in an extra £4BN in tax revenue over the quarter. However, HMRC handled 77.6 % of all contact centre call attempts during the period (its target being 90%!). This sub par performance was blamed on:

- "technology related issues"
- putting more people on employer helplines during the introduction of RTI

HMRC has delayed the introduction of new automated speech features on phone lines which it originally planned to bring in at this time, so it could answer more calls. These are now being trialled and will be rolled out later in the year.

Suffice to say, with the reallocation of staff to call centres, HMRC's post handling has suffered only 70.3% of it mail has been cleared with 15 days (its target being 80%).

Much like a balloon, if you squeeze one part of HMRC another part will pop!

Tax does have to be taxing.

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4 comments:

  1. So, HMRC uses its own data to say how well it is doing. Bit like the "Intelligence" used to justify modern warfare - ethereal.

    Wiki- "Customer service is a series of activities designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction – that is, the feeling that a product or service has met the customer expectation." and "Some have argued[4] that the quality and level of customer service has decreased in recent years, and that this can be attributed to a lack of support or understanding at the executive and middle management levels of a corporation and/or a customer service policy."

    Customer Service - My Ar@e!

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  2. I wouldn't believe a word they said. I worked there for 8 years and they would lie through their teeth, if some managers job was on the line. They probably handled 70% of call centre attempts rather than 77.6%. Post handling was probably 65% but some brown nose statistic whiz kid probably tweeked it up to 70.3%.
    Regardless, why is this muppet outfit not capable of reaching the desired quotas anyway. Its almost 8 years since the brains of Britain came up with the idea of merging these two departments together.

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  3. HMRC & Customer Service, kind of sticks in the throat?

    Of course, The Muppet Show continues to run according to Toyota/Lean principles and the ubiquitous Pacesetter farce.

    From Wikipaedia, a brief synopsis of Toyota "performance" shows over 18m recalls between Sep '07 and Feb '11. Fiscal impact estimated by Toyota to be $4700m.

    What "common purpose" can this blind adherence to such utter tosh serve?

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  4. This was published recently about HMRC`s latest published accounts and speaks volumes as to the lack of confidence in HMRC`s recent performance.



    A statement from The Rt Hon Margaret Hodge MP, Chair of the Committee of Public Accounts:

    "These accounts give us a mixed picture. One of the most startling figures is the tax gap for VAT, which HMRC estimates at £9.6 billion. That is a huge amount of money – 10% of the VAT that should be collected and a third of the overall tax gap. Yet despite some progress, HMRC still does not comprehensively check all VAT returns and its response to the emerging threat from online trading has been far too slow.

    I welcome the progress HMRC is making in tackling fraud and error in the tax credit system, but with £2 billion in overpayments last year it still has a long way to go. And the personal tax credit debt balance is going up, not down. It now stands at £4.8bn, over £1bn greater than the target HMRC hopes to meet by the end of March 2015.

    HMRC met its target to operate a normal PAYE service by March 2013, following previous problems. But it had to forego £953.3 million of tax in the process and there remain questions about its capacity to handle in year changes to taxpayer records. I also have concerns about HMRC’s real time information system (RTI), which has been rolled out before being fully tested. HMRC has chosen not to add in contingency for significant extra costs or measures to deal with major technical failure. This is worrying as the current cost of RTI is already expected to be £115.5m more than originally planned. HMRC is leaving itself exposed, which could be a real concern for DWP as Universal Credit relies on RTI.

    HMRC is responsible for collecting all the tax due. It must do more to crack down on tax avoidance. And it needs to put taxpayers – the customer – at the heart of its services."

    Say no more!!!!

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