UK tax collector's phone service 'deliberately' bad to push users online, say MPs The UK tax collector must "take responsibility for its own failings to offer sufficiently effective digital services to customers," according to a committee of MPs which accused HMRC of "deliberately" poor phone service to push callers online. Parliament's Public Accounts Committee found that 2023-24, His Majesty's Revenue & …
...that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.
don't think they need to be trying to "push people online" to explain why the phone service is so bad. It's so bad because the budgets have been cut and cut to the point where there are nothing like enough staff to do the job, and only staff left working there are the ones willing to do so for peanuts... and we all know what they say about who you get if you pay peanuts.
Once upon a time, a new way of doing things had to be demonstrably better, and people would beat the doors down to get it - think car vs horse, colour TV vs monochrome, CD vs vinyl etc.
Then came the era of the "Nudge Economist".
Now it's all about making something as cheap as possible and herding people off the older better version by hiding, removing, degrading it until the cattle give up. Think streaming, Windows, shrinkflation, call centres...
HMRC aren't alone - they're just catching up with the utility companies, banks and other private sector pioneers of enshittification.
Still waiting for an urgent reply to a call I made three Junes ago...
In the last five years, HMRC have got my tax wrong at least once and sometimes twice in a year; most recently, 'you paid too much tax so we owe you' _and_ 'you paid too little tax so we're adjusting your tax code'...
I am looking forward to see what they screw up this year.
Try living abroad when you don't have to do a UK tax return due to mutual treaty... HMRC still press hard for you still to do so, because of the 7 year rule. Even though I wrung a letter from HMRC confirming that I don't have to do a UK tax return, twice since then they've written saying that I do, only to back off when provided with a copy of said missive and a suitably strong letter, summarised as "Oy! We've agreed this!".
> HMRC aren't alone - they're just catching up with the utility companies, banks and other private sector pioneers of enshittification.
True... but there's a critical difference: if my bank, phone company, streaming service etc do this I can at least try to find a better alternative. Or if I can't find one, I can (in some cases at least) decide to go without that service.
I can't do this with my tax returns.
I am very happy to use online services where available, so I registered for the HMRC "customer" forums. I have posted perhaps three or four questions and without fail, they were not answered correctly by HMRC "admins", even after repeatedly pointing out their wrong statements by providing links to their own internal manuals. Complete FAIL and I've now stopped to use them.
Not just the UK.
I too have been disconnected despite being stuck in a holding queue for Canada Revenue & Other Services & disconnected as we are to busy right now.
It got to the point that I've had to be up & circling in the out of hours queue for about 30 minutes at silly o'clock following the menu prompts "As no one is available right now, please during in service hours", until the lines open out East (2 or 3 hours ahead of MST) & I become available for the next representative, even for being early in the queue it still took over a hour.
In my case up to 18 months and in the end they weaselled saying the reply was received out of time, and to cap it off they aren’t subject to needing to ‘Signed For’ anything originating from Royal Mail with Tracking to confirm when it was actually received.
Absolute fuckers.
Seems you haven't had to deal with DWP. Whilst faster at answering than HMRC, it always seems that you have selected the wrong number or option despite that being the one given in their letter. The helpful person is unable to transfer the call to the right queue, but does have the number you need, so you start again with the recorded encouragement to use online (when only phoning because online hasn't worked for anything complicated), erroneous information on timing, plus an extra minute of don't call us about any of the following topics...
Yes, I had worked in the UK before Brexit, now don't and had to deal with your HMRC and also Pensions. The questions I had and actions I needed are not supported by the online service and require (according to their own website) me to call. It took several days to get through but the person I eventually reached was polite, informed and helpful.
I was shocked to read that last year 25% of HMRC employees were below the poverty line. In the country I now live in, the tax authority regularly poaches personnel from private sector accounting and financial services companies by paying above the market rate for the best people.
"I was shocked to read that last year 25% of HMRC employees were below the poverty line. In the country I now live in, the tax authority regularly poaches personnel from private sector accounting and financial services companies by paying above the market rate for the best people."
I'm not disputing that HMRC and many public sector salaries are poor, as they are. However, poverty in the UK isn't like poverty everywhere. We have one of the highest minimum wages in the world, and in addition our government spends about £140bn a year on non-pension state benefits. The official UK definition of poverty is "Households are considered to be below the UK poverty line if their income is under 60% of the median household income after housing costs for that year." And that definition of course means that a lot of people are deemed to be in poverty, and that poverty can never be eradicated as it is a relative definition.
" there are nothing like enough staff to do the job"
So let's make the whole of taxes even more complicated to confuse even more people. Include the staffing salaries to help people sort out what the owe in the GDP figures and go on to crow about how amazingly well the economy is growing.
One of the things I learned when I had a business with employees is that outsourcing payroll services to a well known company will almost entirely prevent getting audited. Every time the employment/tax mob would go up against them, they'd lose since those companies know more about PR than government drones. In a better dimension, it would be trivial for a company the size of mine (around 12 employees) to do the calculating in-house with the accounting software and not have issues. My software had that option, but the cost of one tiny error, missed filing or tax deposit would cost more in fines than a couple of years of outside service (their work guaranteed).
K.I.S.S. and there isn't the need for there to be entire villages of people that work the support lines. Of course, that leads to government departments with shrinking headcounts which cannot be allowed.
K.I.S.S. and there isn't the need for there to be entire villages of people that work the support lines. Of course, that leads to government departments with shrinking headcounts which cannot be allowed.
Except it's not. It's to do with votes. The tax system is complicated because it is used to buy people to vote for you. All political parties do it, and the one that agrees to make it much, much simpler is the one that is going to piss off too many people and so lose an election. Until you can stop the politicians dicking about with it it will remain shit.
"The tax system is complicated because it is used to buy people to vote for you. "
I can see that as carve-outs are made so companies or industries are given breaks while other aren't. The same can happen for high-worth individuals that want lower rates for passive income (interest earned, stock appreciation, that sort of thing). It's like commanding that fast food restaurants pay a "living" minimum wage unless they bake bread. That's exempts Subway and Panera from the increased minimum wage laws in California. Gig workers were also given protections but Uber and Lyft, the two most egregious offenders, were exempted.
You are not incorrect.
My wife works for HMRC in an undisclosed location, manning the phone lines. (Hence the AC)
As it's heading towards the end of January, they're doing the opposite - pulling people off post to man the phone lines to try and get the volumes down.
HMRC are currently hiring people like you'd not believe. When she was hired, she was one of a tranche of ~180 employees, and looking at the job adverts, they're pulling in the same number on a fortnightly/monthly basis.
They're pushing 2 days WFH simply because the building (even though it's massive) doesn't have enough space to house all the new starters.
"They're pushing 2 days WFH simply because the building (even though it's massive) doesn't have enough space to house all the new starters."
It should be building'S' spread across the country rather than one giant pile of bricks built in the middle of a high cost city. With VOIP, it's dead easy to have an extension darn near anywhere in the world and the ability for a system to route calls to the next available CSR. That allows for WFH, which means that people with limitations can be employed since they will have accommodations in their home to support them and wouldn't need to travel to work each day. Satellite offices can be commissioned as needed using available buildings. When I was working with another photographer, we'd get access to vacant retail shops or commercial buildings so we could set up to take photos of all the girls for a local beauty pageant and other cases where we'd need more space for a large group. There are almost always vacancies that can be had for short term if there isn't a need to do modifications. For us, office space was a problem as it often had a load of cubicles when we needed a big open space so finding offices with network cabling in place and individual workspaces isn't that hard.
You do realise that you've just cost the job of an HMRC employee?!? They told each employee a different time limit, so they could track which one(s) of them leaked! The one that was told precisely 30 minutes is now in a meeting with their boss trying to explain!
As someone who has had to deal with tax problems and not being able to do so on-line, talking to a real person was essential. I will have to do the same thing next year to finish off the transition to retirement. THAT is something that the 'AI system' simply could not get it's head around and asking for help on-line has never taken me to a page that could actually help!
No,
It is because the people who produce the Website are disconnected from the people who are at the 'coalface' and understand the problems that people actually have !!!
HMRC cannot take people off the 'coalface' to improve the website and the contractors producing/updating the website are, as per usual, dealing with vague instructions, requirements etc.
Remember this is a dept that is part of the civil service so 'job creation' is at the core of all work.
HMRC will not simplify anything in case there is a sudden flash of inspiration and some minister/committee decides they can reduce the costs of the HMRC by reducing the headcount by 30%.
Inefficient/mis-managed is the standard of most of Govt ... this is regardless of the 'colour' of the govt !!!
I leave it for the reader to guess why !!!
:)
At a recent IOTA (Intra-European Organisation of Tax Authorities) conference a rep from an EU state gave a presentation on how COVID improved service levels, as people who'd never thought to try the online offerings were forced to. So many found them to be quicker and easier than traditional communication methods and consequently stuck with them that staff are able to support those who are digitally excluded or have complex affairs more effectively.
One key problem in the UK is that every change to HMRC's systems has to save money - and with the shift to digital they took the savings of staff cuts etc before bedding in the new systems so there's no-one around to help with the transition. And of course changes to improve taxpayer experience don't directly save HMRC money, so don't get signed off, either as initial design features or in remedial work. Add in the idiocy of rates and bands which change every year (or even more frequently) confusing taxpayers and their advisers and meaning expensive updates to software across the board... (A deeper issue is that the last government's austerity policies drove an entire generation of the most senior staff to take early retirement, destroying the insitutional memory of how to provide halfway decent service; that'll be even harder to fix than service levels)
Calling from overseas with mounting non-trivial call charges is no joke. Especially when they are trained to only provide stock answers. So no help at all. The other option is Facebook but it seems what you write down they only cursory look at or many are suddenly dyslexic or multi-tasking too much. You then ask again as the answer shows they have not read your question properly. Each cycle is a wait of a few days. Pathetic!
Any Government Service that uses social media like this should be shut down NOW. Posting on these sites is not private and Zuck will sell your data to other. Getting ads for Tax Advisers? Now you know why.
Stop the madness. Besides, Milennials and Gen-X using Facebook? No way, that's for oldies.
Off the top of my head . . .
Logging on is a pain in the arse.
You can get disconnected or make a mistake any time.
You don't get to see the questions up front, so you can easily enter something that has unforeseen consequences later.
You cannot see what you have submitted without logging on again (it might not be accessible afterwards anyway).
It is all about controlling access to your own vital personal data.
Paper (evidence) is better (for us!) in every way.
> Paper (evidence) is better (for us!) in every way.
Many years ago my flatmate dealt with letters from Inland revenue by phoning them up, etc.
He ended up being heavily penalised as there were NO records of his interactions. Lesson being: "keep it all in writing"
In all walks of life where you need to have 'evidence' KEEP RECORDS, Names, Numbers, Dates/Times etc !!!
It is overkill ... until you need it !!!
Why do you think that orgs use on-line chat etc, most people do not keep records ... when it suits orgs they can 'FIND' what THEY need BUT if you ask they are usually 'not very good' at finding what YOU need ... particularly if it would show that they made the error/mistake !!!
This is usually the 'we only keep 3 months recordings etc' excuse and yet the call 2 weeks ago is not to be found !!!???
:)
I spent many years in HMRC Longbenton working on the IT side and being in the perfect place to watch HMRC at work or lack of it and let me tell you the biggest waste of time, was staff pushing paper from one inbox to another, loo brakes bordering on light years and stopping for long endless chats of non-work related matter. Yes we all talk at work to colleagues, but HMRC staff take it to another level and if they get told off about wasting too much time, go crying to the union rep. I know of the hours in my role, wasted waiting on HMRC staff to get out of the way so my work can be done but they move and work at the same speed of an ice age.
My other half recently retired after being made redundant, so we shuffled monies around to be more tax efficient. All within the rules, but it made things hard for the poor loves at HMRC to understand. They would demand a paperwork trail for things they were informed by the pension companies, and we had no option to send them recorded delivery (at £7 a time) otherwise they would mysteriously be marked as "not received". Letters written were either ignored or only half read, giving us the impression that people were just doing enough to get it off their desk and flag it as "waiting for taxpayer". Eventually we managed to get them to register her for Self Assessment, and I was able to complete a tax return, with all the necessary additional information, done and dusted within an hour. Far less stressful, and much quicker than hanging on the phone or writing endless letters.
Even better is that you get a confirmation that all is complete within a couple of days, and they even send a written statement to that effect. How quaint.
So while I would agree that they need to sort out secure electronic messaging, they also need to have competent humans to read and act on those messages. They way things are looking, that won't happen any time soon, but we'll be emailing chatbots instead.
My conclusion is that the system they already have does in fact work, but only if you complete a Self Assessment. Just don't ask them for any help.
… but then they don’t know either. I’m convinced chariots got dreamed up purely to mask crap web site design (and I’m talking ability to find information, not how pretty it looks). Having said that the Gov digital service does seem to have got its ducks aligned as the sites are easy to navigate. But I take the point made earlier that you can get ambushed for evidence part way through.
You can start blaming Gordon Brown (and others) for that. He was famous or infamous depending on you POV... for adding hundreds of pages to the Tax book with every budget.
The whole thing needs scrapping and starting again with a system for the 21st Century not the 19th.
I think it may even be an 18th Century system....
The UK tax year ends on 5th April because it used to start on 25th March (also known as one of the 4 "Quarter Days"), but in 1752 we moved from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, and 5th April is 11 days after 25th March. Then, since 1800 was NOT a leap year, it was moved to 6th April to accommodate the extra day and it has stuck there ever since.
We lost 11 days in September, 1752[1], so we could *finally* adjust to European dates, but the Treasury didn't want to lose part of a year in revenue, so instead moved the new tax year to start 11 days later. And it's been that way ever since.
[1] $ cal 9 1752
September 1752
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1 2 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
It's worth noting that when New Zealand introduced GST and got rid of 4 levels of sales tax, plus simplified income tax to 3 steps, they were able to lay off 30% of the IRD workforce 5 years later, whilst simultaneously reducing overall taxation burden AND increasing net income
Compliance costs are a big deal - both on the payment and collection side. Every percentage point reduced is extra income in the pockets of one or the other party
There's a regular EU complaint about corporate tax rates in Ireland being too low.
Ireland has a very simple corporate tax regime and actually most companies (not big enough to play silly buggers across different regimes) pay the standard rate.
France has a much higher rate but so many exceptions that no business pays the standard rate and the average rate paid is lower than Ireland's.
Sometimes odd things stick in one's mind. I recall in CofE primary school the vicar explaining that the King James version describes St Matthew as having been a "publican" before being called to be an Apostle and that publican meant "tax collector". He didn't go on to explain the moral of this. It took adulthood to make the connection - that even someone as dishonest as a tax collector could be saved. As he'd been a business man before becoming a vicar I suppose he'd made that onnection for himself.
When my father was staying with me in Dec 2023 to Jan 2024 he needed to call HMRC to sort some issue out, and he had them on speaker phone and was on hold for a good 30 mins with about every minute a automated voice message say 'do you know you can do a lot of things online at our website, why not go to Gov.uk" and this went on and on for the entire duration of the call. And i wanted to throw the phone out of the Window by the time he eventually got through to someone.
Needing assistance with things is an ongoing reality as things aren't being designed and improved to be easy to understand by those that have to use them. With that said, one thing that is about the only good thinking eBay has come up with is being able to request a call back within a time frame rather than holding the line for ages and becoming note perfect on "The Girl from Ipanema" as one sings/hums/burbles along. "your call is important"? BS. If it were, somebody would be put on to get to it. With a call back, I can do other things while I wait for a ring back. Being able to type in the problem so the CSR can prep would be a great addition. Their canned banter is annoying.
"We've improved an utterly unacceptable waiting period to a slightly less utterly unacceptable waiting period"
A whole 17 minutes, on a 70+ minute wait
Once upon a time it was regarded as bad form to have callers waiting more than 3 minutes - and it's quite likely the calls which are being dropped are done in order to reduce that measured delay
One wonders what the stats on abandoned calls is - or if they're bothering to measure it (it's a critical value, for obvious reasons)
"This coming year I will try to devise ways of making their life impossible whan I fill in my tax return."
Do it the way I do mine, on paper, by hand and mailed in. I'll keep doing that until it's banned. And, if you are due a refund, don't let them do a direct deposit. For one thing, they can reach back in and empty your account if they later think they made a mistake. The other is that is costs the government more money to send a check. The best thing is to keep government starved. Maybe it would be a good idea to let politicians pay for their programs/pork out of their own purses.
The online-only options of Universal Credit, Child Tax Credits etc are an absolute horror show for people who claim these. It's frustrating enough for people with the time or the willingness to do it, never mind people in difficult situations or without adequate Internet access. The websites are slow, unreliable and wait times to access them are abysmal. This is from personal experience over many years. HMRC are horrendous to get in touch with also. I genuinely think it's deliberate to stop people from accessing things they are entitled to.
"The online-only options of Universal Credit, Child Tax Credits etc are an absolute horror show for people who claim these."
That's very telling. I should have noted the "YMMV" disclaimer based on the country you are in and what options you might have.
If the online systems worked properly I wouldn't have had to phone them at all. Completing my tax return a few weeks ago I realised their calculation was wrong - it didn't take into account marriage allowance and so was claiming I owed them ~£250. After trying the utterly useless chatbot service I resorted to the phone; after being on hold for an interminable period (more than an hour anyway) I did get through to someone who was helpful, ran the calculations and agreed with me that their figures were wrong.
The solution? Submit the tax return with correct figures but wrong calculation and wait. "The system" should detect that it's wrong, recalculate and send a letter with the correctly calculated value!
By a strange coincidence said letter just arrived an hour ago. Imagine how much time and money would have been saved if the online system simply did the calculation correctly in the first place - over an hour of my time on the phone and researching online; the whole conversation with the HMRC guy, the printing and postage of the letter - all completely avoidable.
All complaining about the system but the roses are about to bloom!
Apparently the enlightened Government is pulling sqillions of pounds from budgets to replace the aged HMRC system with AI because according to the venture capitalist advisor, obviously, AI!
The AI will be much better than the current HMRC system as it's been fully trained by the HMRC.
The AI will be able to save money by answering the phone using the same message "the phone lines are still experiencing the unusually high volumes of traffic" used since Covid.
The AI will be able to answer all questions as long as they are the correct questions.
The AI will be able to pass you to an operator where you can be put on hold until your call times out.
At any time during your call, the AI system can be queried by starting your phrase with "Alexa ..."
This will be so much better since an answerphone message can be replaced with a multi-million pound AI system to do a better job with no human interaction at any point *and* the Government get to sell all your data to the highest bidders.
Don't fill the website to the brim with google spyware, proprietary JavaScript and ludicrous contract terms and people will hesitate less to use it.
Really, to ensure the site always works and is fast, the usage of JavaScript should be forbidden (HTML5 can do client-side input validation just fine and you need to do it serverside regardless).
Otherwise, I'm calling, as that can be done with free software.
I did a search and found a document from the “office of tax simplification” 12 years ago which states the uk tax rules ran to 6500 pages (another source reckoned 13000).
To quote an old two ronnies joke
The government has decided to simply the tax return, it will now consist of two parts.
1 how much did you earn
2 sent it to us
But seriously the number of rebates, discounts rates etc is extremely complicated - it would be a lot simpler to have a single tax rate I.e. everything over 24k (min wage) is taxed at 33%, this would eliminate all the confusion and the need to contact hmrc for 99% of people.
People will object to this and it probably isn’t workable but it would be a lot easier, share income same rate, dividends same rate, investments same rate…. You never know it might eliminate tax dodgers and make life better for all of us…
A few years ago, suffering from side effects to medication that were killing my brain; I reached out to HMRC for help, as I couldnt think straight and needed help with my tax returns; online and emails were ignored for months, so I tried calling, I got through several times, and each time was promised help would be provided - but nothing ever came of it; by this time, I was racking up huge fines for not filing my returns.
In desperation, I POSTED A LETTER.
I had HMRC on the phone, talking to me and making an appointment to meet a real live person at a location near where I lived; when he realised I couldn't even retain single digit numbers read out to me to write down, and that I was in need of serious help, he completed the forms for me; got the fines dropped on the spot; and made notes on my account detailing my issues.
That meant HMRC knew I was suffering from a serious medical condition nearly a YEAR before the NHS, as my doctors were ignoring my symptoms.
''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
My doctors finally took notice when I went blind.
Treatment restored my eyesight and reversed much of the brain damage, however I have large gaps in my memory, nerve damage and still have random issues retaining new information.
Stay safe everyone.
And Germany is behind when it comes to be digital in government, including healthcare, comparing to many European countries, let alone US and China. (for the US: concentrating on the doing such things digital point)
But then i read those horror stories from UK here. Wait, it could be so much worse?
In my retirement I've become a "Digital Champion". So I'm spending time helping people who've never gained the skills of using a computer, nor in most cases ever had access to one ( to get to know their way round a laptop). After a few weeks they're given a refurbished machine, subject to obvious bureaucratic conditions.
But I have no doubt that they are just a small sample of an enormous pool - of all ages incidentally. Many of them have only the most basic understanding of even their smart phones.
People who're screwed if they can’t access medical care, financial support, energy account and so forth by phoning. Which is increasingly the case. Further, these are the ones most susceptible to online scams (note, no one is 100% safe- we can all get caught) such as fake web sites offering driving tests or benefit claims or tax help ( when they are overcharged on their small incomes), etc etc.
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