In December 2012 the National Audit Office (NAO) published a report, Customer Service Performance, which noted that HMRC received 79M calls and answered 74% of them in 2011/12, exceeding a provisional target of 58%. However, as the NAO stated, HMRC didn't exactly have high aspirations:
"HMRC’s service targets are lower and cover fewer areas than those of other organisations."However, despite these low aspirations, the service level was unsatisfactory; as could be seen from the headline figure approximately 20M calls went unanswered. Those who did manage to get through had to wait on average 282 seconds before being put through to an adviser.
Moving on to the present day, the NAO is now claiming some "glory" from the report in that the NAO claims that this report has resulted in an improvement in the way HMRC deals with its customers
The NAO impact statement says that HMRC now plans to answer 80% of calls within five minutes, introduce more online services and replace the expensive 0845 helplines with 03 numbers.
All very jolly no doubt, except that in March this year I wrote:
"HMRC's target of answering 80% of calls within five minutes is "unambitious and woefully inadequate", and would still leave 16 million people waiting longer than five minutes."The NAO should be a little less keen to blow its own trumpet in the future, unless there is a genuinely impressive improvement in performance from one of its audited organisations.
Tax does have to be taxing.
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So, what benefit in kind has anyone in the NAO received on the back of this?
ReplyDeleteTrumpet lessons?;)
DeleteHah,
Deletehad a look at the phrase "blowin' smoke up my a@@" and came across an explanation that applies to all HMRC claims:-
"to bullshit or lie, to tell a falsehood. originally comes from the era of snake-oil salesmen and traveling hucksters pandering cure-all ointments.....as such, the phrase became the euphemism it is today for selling a line of nonsense to an otherwise naive or unsuspecting rube."
and;
"
I'd rather spend 5 minutes waiting on an 03 number at zero cost than be paying 40p/min to ring the old 0845 or 0870 number.
ReplyDeleteI'd rather not have to phone this bunch of tw@ts in the first place without having to pay, wait or listen to some fecking list of options before getting through to an illegal immigrant who doesn't pay tax tell me what i should be doing.
ReplyDeleteYou need to watch the afternoon shift going in to the call centres!