Brave New Tax Office

The mysteries of Chapel Wharf are explored by ROBERT MAAS FCA, FTII.

UNTIL A FEW weeks ago, Chapel Wharf was just a name to me. I did not know where it was or what it did, but I did know the name because it generates a lot of the complaints crossing my desk from Tax Faculty members. Then the Revenue invited me up to see for myself. I now know that it is in Salford and that its 1,600 staff, in addition to the 355 in the Inland Revenue Contact Centre, makes it the ninth largest employer in Salford.

So what is Chapel Wharf? It is a tax office dealing exclusively with pay-as-you-earn and with taxpayers whose prime source of income is Schedule E or who are pensioners. It merged together seven existing London Provincial offices. It is also one of the Revenue's call centres (or contact centres as the Revenue prefers to call them).

It is so large that it is also on its own an area office under the Revenue's area management structure, with its area board on the premises. The area board represents all activities including service, compliance, the contact centre and corporate support. The trade union also sits on the area board. In my personal view it is also a microcosm of where the Inland Revenue ought to be going.

I met all of the Board, and my host for the day was Paul Brown, the services director, who, together with Tom Matthews, contact centre manager, is responsible for ensuring the smooth operation of Chapel Wharf. Paul's enthusiasm for what Chapel Wharf is trying to achieve was infectious. But he also arranged for me to talk to a selection of staff and even the tax office's trade union representatives, who view the office somewhat less idyllically than Paul. I left Salford with an appreciation of why some of the problems I knew about had occurred, but also with a conviction that in a couple of years' time, the office will be providing an efficient and professional service.

Call centre methodology

Why do I believe this? Let's start with the call centre. My heart sank when I was told that roughly 40 per cent of the staff has been recruited locally and given 20 weeks training (one week learning the system and 19 weeks learning tax) before handling our calls.

But it is not as simple as that. In an attempt to address some of our concerns about the consistency of advice sometimes provided by the Revenue, contact centres are in the forefront of the department's development of what it calls 'on line guidance'. Advisers are trained to use this on line guidance rather than rely on their training and memory. Part of the training is knowing when to call for help. Most of the 355 desks are arranged in groups of nine, including a team leader who is at a more experienced level. While I was in the call centre, I saw one lady raise her hand and the team leader hurried over to discuss the point with her while the caller held on. There are also 'floorwalkers' circulating who will take over the call where necessary.

The call centre is set up to be the first point of contact for all unsolicited calls from its 'customer' base. For solicited calls, that is where the Revenue first contacts a taxpayer, a direct line number should be provided so that the taxpayer can speak directly to the person initiating the contact. The call centre is currently successfully dealing with something like 95 per cent of all such unsolicited calls. The Revenue operates business by telephone rules setting out what actions can be completed over the telephone. Where a call cannot be fully actioned over the telephone, the call centre is able to pass the call to the tax office for completion, and about five per cent of calls answered are transferred to the tax office in this way.

Quality control

All calls are recorded and a sample is reviewed as part of the centre's quality control. Earlier in the year, the contact centre acknowledged that it was not achieving its targets, so it agreed to set up a temporary priority line for accountants and agents who regularly dealt with Chapel Wharf. Although the Chapel Wharf contact centre is now achieving its targets, it is agreed to extend this emergency service to 31 March 2003. Most callers should now be able to get through quickly on the 0845 number.

I am hoping that the Revenue can be persuaded to develop dedicated agent helplines (not just at Chapel Wharf), not only because I cannot see why unrepresented taxpayers should have to suffer in order to improve the quality of service to agents but also because my perception is that agents often have more technical issues that cannot readily be dealt with by call centre staff. I know that the Revenue is considering how it can address the concerns of various segments of its 'customers', and hope it will include this issue in its considerations.

Wide-ranging calls

The Chapel Wharf call centre not only deals with Chapel Wharf taxpayers. It also answers calls to the national self assessment tax helpline, the building industry subcontractors helpline, the filing by Internet helpline and the savings income helpline. Apart from the subcontractors helpline whose calls are routed only to band D Revenue executives, as the questions tend to be more specialist, all call centre staff deal with all of these helplines, i.e. the call is routed to whoever is available. Call centre staff have available to them frequently asked questions and a mass of technical reference material in electronic format. Many of them have also built up their personal selections of paper reference material, such as the self-assessment agents pack and the pay-as-you-earn booklets, which they keep close to hand. I was very impressed by how hard everyone seemed to be working.

Correspondence

I shall return to the subject of the call centre later. The tax office is similarly organised into groups of around ten staff plus a manager. All outgoing letters are routed through the manager. Paul anticipates that this should eliminate most of the obvious errors. As the staff are not interrupted by telephone calls (except for technical referrals from the call centre), they should be able to turn round letters much quicker.

For what it is worth, currently the office is meeting the Revenue's 15-day target for post about 80 per cent of the time, although personally I am not a fan of such targets. I would prefer to receive a well-considered letter within a month or even a couple of months, rather than a quick response that appears to have been rushed or raises further questions (which often appear to have been asked merely as a quick way to make the target) and which does not address the open issues. As an experiment, one group is dealing with the straightforward letters that can be, and are, responded to immediately with little or no need for research.

Complaints

But what about the complaints? Well, some arise because Paul likes to experiment. There is a staff suggestion box and a discussion board on the office intranet. If someone comes up with an idea, he may well be encouraged to give it a go. Inevitably some such ideas strike me and other agents as outrageous when I am on the receiving end. I am all for encouraging initiative though, provided that an experiment is quickly terminated if it is seen to create problems. Some errors are inevitable in any organisation, and the bigger the organisation the greater the number of likely errors.

Paul thinks that the Chapel Wharf database is around ten per cent of the entire national Revenue 'customer' base. It deals with 3.3 million taxpayers, including 535,000 who complete self-assessment tax returns. It receives three million telephone calls and 5.2 million items of post in a year. Although it is primarily a pay-as-you-earn centre, its taxpayer base is largely in London and the employees of the 50,000 employers with which it deals often have complex affairs. For example, it has a large number of non-domiciled taxpayers and a large number who work in a job for short periods.

Finally, Chapel Wharf went operational only about a year ago, and that was a mere eight months from conception. Paul accepts that a longer lead time would have been desirable. However, no amount of planning could have predicted that the central computer would crash on the first day and that it would take a fortnight to get it working properly. Merging 1,600 staff from several offices, setting up new ways of working, building a team spirit and creating a call centre from scratch is a monumental task, so it is hardly surprising that agents noticed an abnormal number of problems while that was being done. Paul accepts that it might have been better to have told us about the problems at the time, rather than leave us to curse his staff!

Morale

Of course, everything is not rosy. Staff do not like processing returns and leaving someone else to carry out the enquiries. I suspect that is not peculiar to Chapel Wharf. Sadly, I also suspect that by abolishing allocations of taxpayers, the Revenue has been able to use its staff more efficiently. I hope that allocations will be looked at again and, if they are not practical, that a way can be found to allow processing staff to open a few enquiries themselves on smaller taxpayers where they identify an issue during the processing.

I think that would improve both morale and, as a result, the accuracy of processing work. Most agents do not like dealing with call centres, but perhaps we need to learn to use them.

Facts and figures

The Chapel Wharf call centre is open from 8 am to 8 pm and also on Saturday, so those of us who are used to the old 10 am to 4 am availability of Revenue staff may well find that we can contact the Revenue far more easily through the call centre. Incidentally, Monday morning and the day after a Bank holiday are bad times to call as they are the busiest periods. It is possible to get through quickly in the afternoon, evening or on Saturday, so perhaps we ought to organise our own work to use such slack periods.

The call centre target is at the top end of industry standards of no more than five per cent to receive an engaged tone, no more than five per cent to abandon their call and 95 per cent of the balance should be dealt with in 20 seconds. Although these targets are normally met, the queue is limited to 20 calls, i.e. if you are number 21 you get the engaged tone. So with 355 operators, the likelihood of one becoming free within 20 seconds seems pretty high.

Call centres are efficient. If the call centre has problems, the volume of post increases; equally if the tax office is in arrears dealing with post or returns, the call centre suffers. Paul has a target to reduce the post from its current 5.2 to three million items a year without increasing the size of the call centre. The tax office is having to deal with an increasing workload with a declining staff. It is achieving this by cutting out unnecessary work as well as speeding up other work with better systems. Staffing has shrunk by about ten per cent since the office opened.

Promising future

Paul is looking for ways to get closer to his 'customers'. He has already set up a large business user group and is considering how to get closer to other employers and to agents. He hopes to build up statistics that can influence national tax strategy. Staff appear largely happy, friendly, and extremely hardworking.

A large office not only creates economies of scale, but enables tasks such as facilities management to be dealt with as a dedicated job, rather than an added responsibility for someone not geared up for such work. This both enables such jobs to be dealt with more efficiently and releases tax specialists from spending time on office administration.

I think that Chapel Wharf is proving that the Revenue can use new technologies to improve service levels. It has only been going a year so is still in a development phase. I feel excited at many of Paul's future plans. His vision is a truly customer-focussed operation. If he achieves most of what he is aiming for, I think that we will come to welcome dealing with Chapel Wharf.

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