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HMRC today agreed to take steps to improve the delivery of their services, particularly the handling of mail, in response to concerns expressed by a number of professional bodies and tax charities.
The news follows a summit last week between senior Revenue officials and representatives of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), the Chartered Institute of Taxation, the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland, the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, the Association of Accounting Technicians, the Association of Taxation Technicians, the Low Incomes Tax Reform Group, Tax Aid, and TaxHelp for Older People.
The meeting was held in response to the publication last month of a Treasury select committee report that included the recommendation that HMRC should work closely with organisations and businesses to improve the end-to-end practice of dealing with the taxman.
It was agreed by the department that the handling of post and telephone calls should be investigated in depth to understand the experiences of taxpayers and agents and why they are sometimes different from the perceptions of HMRC bosses.
The Revenue has pledged to establish the areas in which mail-related problems exist and how they can be resolved. (The department will also review its own performance measures where necessary to ensure they are credible and effective).
The measure comes several months after Taxation launched its Right to a Reply campaign, in which readers were urged to contact their MPs to complain about the taxman’s delay in responding to advisers’ written correspondence.
HMRC have also made the commitment that tax agents and charity representatives will spend time with frontline service delivery teams, to look at processes in detail from the taxpayer’s perspective and make recommendations as appropriate – and the Revenue will carry out structured visits to the offices of a number of practitioners and charities in an effort to understand the taxpayer’s point of view of service delivery.
The department’s chairman Mike Clasper, who led last week’s gathering of officials, said, ‘We need to get a better understanding of the interaction of our customers [sic] and stakeholders with HMRC and of their experiences in resolving tax issues. Working with agent colleagues inside and outside HMRC will provide that knowledge and lead to better services.’
A statement issued on behalf the organisations involved in the negotiations read, ‘This exercise is emphatically not a “talking shop”, and where appropriate we intend to make public the results and the action to be taken from the work streams we have embarked on.’
The chairman of the ICAEW Tax Faculty's technical committee, Paul Aplin, said he felt 'more optimistic about making real progress on service issues than I have for a long time.
'The personal commitment from Mike Clasper to see things from a customer perspective and make real progress was clear to everyone in the room when we met.'
