Ever wondered why it takes HMRC so long to answer a letter?
A loyal reader yesterday summed up the reasons for the ever slower response times:
"HMRC announced that they were going to start scanning all incoming post so they closed all the Regional Post Rooms (including Shipley which has the mysterious BX5 postcode).Response times are, if I am right, around 8 weeks or more?
What they didnt tell Shipley was that Shipley would become the postroom for the whole of HMRC until the digitalisation programme was complete.
And therein lies the problem, Shipley is running on a skeleton staff and are struggling to cope with the volumes of post coming in and there are delays in distributing post to the network.
I dont blame the staff, they are doing their best - its EXCOM I blame."
Tax does have to be taxing.
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Its a good job the excom mob are not responsible for anything serious like bombing Syria, these twats would have the planes in Cyprus, the fuel in Lossiemouth, the crews in Coningsby, the bombs in Kinloss and the fuses in Northolt!
ReplyDeleteIf excom are representative of public sector management generally then no wonder the likes of the NHS are so bad.
Grrrr.
What goes on with this idiot outfit when a friend received a response to his letter after five months whilst an inspector demanded a written response from a taxpayer within 30 days? Any hope of it self destructing?
ReplyDeleteIt is self destructing thanks to ExComm, put what you like no your tax return there will be nobody left to check as E&C is dismantled.
Delete11.09- What's the problem with that? It's fully in accord with pacestter principles.
ReplyDeleteGuess the 7 P's don't figure with all that Kaizen stuff then?
Deletei think your loyal reader may have slightly misled you... the Shipley office was used to trial post scanning... the BX post codes are now used by royal mail to direct post to HMRC's scanning partner i.e. outsourced.... the reason it takes so long to answer phones or letters is that staff are juggled between the two... depending on what questions Lin Homer might have to answer if front of PAC that week
ReplyDeleteLast year was an utter shambles. I wrote at the start of the year outlining my predicted income and expected tax reliefs (i.e. SIPPs) after 4 months I got a response stating that they can only amend tax code after evidence of payments to a pension (which I know is crap as my wife's and my own tax code in previous years have been changed on predicted pension payments). Ironically, by the time I received the letter back, I'd already made my SIPP payments, so I sent a letter back with all the evidence in. 4 months later I received a response, asking me to confirm whether the payments were gross or net. I was fuming as I'd already stated this in my letter and the print out from my pension provider also stated it. So once again I wrote back. 4 months later I received a response back telling me that it was too late in the year to amend my tax code and I'd have to do a self assessment.
ReplyDeleteI would love to take my business elsewhere. Is it not seriously time that public services have two competing organisations and we should be free to choose the best performing one. The one that gets the "custom" is the one that receives more funding... Should shake out some inefficiencies...
@ 20:30
DeleteWe have lost 40,000 staff in the last 10 years.....have an appalling senior management structure...it is now getting to the stage that sending a letter to the customer whether it is right or wrong is seen as a success.
All EXCOM care about now is good statistics...the staff at the coal face want to do a good job,but we aren't allowed to......customer service is long dead...it truly is a circus in here.....an absolute disgrace !!!
Strongly agree. "Quality" in HMRC is measured according to how accurately a process is followed, and not by whether the action was meaningful / relevant / brought in tax. If you follow the SOP / SWI process accurately then that will hit the quality target, even if the content of the letter misses its target by a mile. But if your letter is bang on target and brings home the tax then it will still be classed as a quality failure if you've failed to follow some minor point of a SOP / SWI process. Duh.
DeleteI am very sorry for anyone working there. I have just spent over an hour with a poor front-liner trying to sort out 'a glitch in the system' that resulted in my being sent a letter threatening me with bailiffs even though they knew I was no longer an employer, I was not an employer at the time they refer to, and I haven't been an employer for 11 months. It didn't help that the timescale to pay the demand I was given in the bailiff warning letter had expired before I even got it in the post. I would never contemplate being an employer again - not because of my employee (who was great), but solely because of the HMRC's mess-ups during and since the two months last year that I employed someone. The result of our conversation was that they couldn't do anything because their IT system wouldn't let them so I now had to phone the Employers Helpline so that they could see if they could clear my IT record instead. As this follows many months of similar phonecalls in order to get the original date logged and I can now do nothing online because they've logged I am no longer an employer, I despair of ever seeing an end to this. The really worrying bit was that I was continually assured that this happened to a lot of people and actually most businesses so it wasn't a problem really........
ReplyDeleteThe employers section used to be a top class service....it was local...you got to speak to a person on first name terms who was actually dealing with your personal case...it was an efficient customer based operation....it was a pleasure to work there.
DeleteEXCOM wanted to save money.....centralisation took over....customer service and quality died.
The HMRC is dying a slow death ;(
hmrc alread died anoyomous i used to work there until well lets just say recently the office worked in was descaled to 2 floors from 4 floors all the phones had a pin no introduced the photocopiers required a fob to be used and there was an announcement on the nov 5th that 170 offices were going to be closed down and as you probably already know there would be 13 regional centres in the uk sad isnt't it hmrc has already died RIP HMRC
DeleteSigifired....your reply to my post is spot on.......sadly i have no choice but to work on in this cesspit...i may have been wrong in saying that it is dying in here....but it has now turned into a zombie and is taking everyone with it !!
Delete