Nearly one in ten of HMRC’s most senior staff have stopped turning up on Fridays, as the taxman’s four-day week perk has exploded while taxpayers continue to wait for answers.
Figures released to Guido’s FOI Unit show that, as of 31 July this year, 9.1% of Grade 6 officials and 9.0% of Senior Civil Servants at HMRC were working compressed hours over a four-day week.
And the perk is growing fast.
In June 2024, 1,542 full-time HMRC staff were on a compressed four-day week. By July this year, that had risen to 2,267, a 47% increase in just two years.
Among the senior ranks, the growth is even more striking. The number of Grade 6 officials on compressed hours jumped 64%, while Grade 7 numbers rose 55%. The Senior Civil Service figure increased by 37.5%.
This is overwhelmingly a management phenomenon. The numbers at the bottom of the organisation have barely shifted: Assistant Officers and Administrative Assistants on four-day compressed hours remain at around 1%.
So while the junior staff keep the machinery running, an ever-growing slice of the management ranks are squeezing the working week into four days.
The obvious question is whether taxpayers are getting an equivalent service in return.
A Cabinet Office source told Guido: “It’s often the case that staff working on compressed hours do less work overall because of the way their weekday structure changes.”
HMRC insists that isn't happening, claiming employees on compressed hours “receive no reduction in expected workload, performance standards or accountability”.
There is, however, a rather awkward problem with that assurance: HMRC cannot produce the evidence to demonstrate that the arrangement has no effect on productivity or service delivery.
Asked for any internal review of the impact on productivity, output or customer service, HMRC confirmed that it “does not hold a central assessment, review or monitoring report”.
In other words, the taxman is expanding a working arrangement across thousands of staff, including a significant and growing proportion of its senior officials, without centrally monitoring whether it actually works.
Worse still, HMRC cannot even say how many applications for compressed hours it rejects, because there is no central record of applications.
That makes it rather difficult for taxpayers to know whether this is a carefully managed workforce policy or simply another benefit being handed out with remarkably little scrutiny.
And the backdrop is hardly one of flawless performance.
HMRC's own 2024/25 accounts show that just 76.9% of customer correspondence was dealt with within 15 working days, below its own 80% service standard. At the end of March 2025, 2.29 million items of correspondence were still on hand. HMRC also managed to answer only 71.5% of callers seeking an adviser, against an 85% target.
Yet at the same time as taxpayers were waiting for the taxman to answer their correspondence, HMRC was expanding a system under which staff can work their hours across four days instead of five.
The internal guidance says employees on compressed hours work 9 hours and 15 minutes across four days, rather than 7.4 hours across five. Arrangements can last for up to five years before staff have to reapply.
Temporary arrangements can be approved by a line manager without formal HMRC involvement, while the policy itself acknowledges that such arrangements can cover periods when “not all duties of your role are fulfilled”.
And then there is the rather generous interaction with home working.
Compressed hours sit alongside HMRC's two-days-a-week home-working arrangements, meaning a Grade 6 employee could potentially be physically in an HMRC office for just two days a week — while enjoying a three-day weekend.
Bank holidays are handled with a distinctly relaxed approach too: staff are told that their entitlement is not calculated automatically and that they must “keep a manual record”.
HMRC's wider policy document says it “believe[s] that flexible working can promote work-life balance and improve wellbeing and performance”.
That may be true for employees.
But for the taxpayer, the more important question is whether flexibility for HMRC staff is being matched by flexibility, speed and competence for the people who actually fund the organisation.
HMRC's own figures suggest there is still plenty of room for improvement. The department says customer service is getting better, but its correspondence performance remains below target, with millions of pieces of correspondence still being handled and hundreds of thousands missing the 15 day standard.
Before HMRC congratulates itself on the wonders of flexible working, perhaps it should first demonstrate that the taxpayer isn't the one paying for it!
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