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I thought your readers would be interested to know about the apparent mess HMRC appear to be in with their correspondence ‘stock pile’.
Back in July this year I submitted a form to the Leicester tax office making an in year claim on a trivial pension payment my client received in June 2009. I believe much of the correspondence for Leicester now gets redirected to East Kilbride, but I’m not sure!
Having waited several months I was told that my client should make this claim through her 2009/10 self assessment tax return, which of course defeated the whole reason for making the claim in the first place.
When I pursued this, I was told by the contact centre in East Kilbride that I would have to wait up to five days for somebody to call me back. Suffice to say, five days passed by with no phone call, so I called the contact centre myself to then be told that due to a change in the PAYE computer system, we are still dealing with post going back as far as 1 June 2009.
I find this absolutely unacceptable, but after expressing these views to the contact centre manager, I managed to get no further.
Are other readers of Taxation experiencing similar problems and, if so, how do they run their practice during these difficult times?
Frustrated Reader
Reply from HMRC
Due to the huge scale of our work and despite our best efforts we do sometimes take longer to respond to our customers than we would like. We are very sorry for this.
We have recently upgraded our IT systems for dealing with PAYE customers to improve the service we provide and increase efficiency within HMRC. The new PAYE service was progressively made available to our staff between 29 June 2009 and 20 July 2009.
We planned carefully to minimise the impact on our customers during this time. We recognise that some of our customers have experienced delays in receiving a response to their enquiries and correspondence; however, we have plans in place to ensure that any work we were unable to deal with during this period is brought up to date.
Where a customer requires a telephone call-back, we should call them back within five working days and are sorry if this has not happened. We will follow this matter up if your reader can provide us details of the telephone call.
I agree that the delay in dealing with correspondence is utterly unacceptable. If we dealt with our clients like that we wouldn't have any!
Another issue we had earlier in the year was the length of time taken to issue refunds. As usual, in many cases where the return was marked to send a refund to the client, the Revenue ignored this instruction and held onto the funds. Then, when the problem was identified and the refund requested, either online or by phone, HMRC felt the need to carry out 'security checks' before issuing the payment. Sometimes these security checks took up to 6 weeks to be done and then the clients money would be refunded.
I pointed out to one staff member in East Kilbride that this might have something to do with the governments finances and that it was very convenient for these things to take so long at a time when the Revenue stopped paying repayment supplements. I was met with a shocked response concerned that I could even think such a thing.
Hmmmmmm.............