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KEY POINTS
- Working Together was based on local agents and local offices.
- Now revamped after HMRC reorganisation with 60+ local groups.
- Taxation and AccountingWeb are hosting Working Together e-groups.
- These will work in a similar way to the existing groups, but online.
If there is one aspect of working with HMRC that older advisers will bore their younger staff rigid with, given half a chance, it is the relationship that they used to have with their local district in ‘the old days’.
Given that a large majority of most practices’ clients would be dealt with by a few local districts, and that the District Inspectors (DIs) who ran them had real ‘district charge’, the lines of contact to deal with problems were obvious.
Ring up the DI, maybe even go out for a pint over lunch, and you could talk sensibly about an issue and come to a mutually satisfactory conclusion.
Now it has to be said that our rear-view mirrors are rather rose-tinted here.
I don’t actually remember tax advisers thinking that everything was sweetness and light back then, and I certainly recall more complaints than I hear now about how the DI in Borchester raised enquiries into every herd basis election, while the DI in Barchester had a thing about the taxability of Christmas gifts to vicars, for example.
But it is probably true to say that the network of HMRC local offices meant advisers felt there was a natural match between their own structure and that of the then Inland Revenue; most advisers outside the top 30 or so firms operated predominantly in a particular geographical area, which corresponded roughly with local districts.
Working together
As a result, when in 1999 Working Together was formed at a national level between the Inland Revenue and the accountancy bodies, as a way of dealing with ‘the grit in the system’, it was both natural and straightforward to replicate it at local level.
With self-assessment in place, and computerisation of tax return preparation becoming more and more common in accountancy practices, we were all getting used to the idea that our job was to feed the electronic monster with the facts and figures it needed, but the basic structure of adviser and tax office interaction was still in place.
Working Together became an extremely useful forum for exchanging thoughts and solving problems, both at its national and local level.
Since the Revenue systems were inevitably becoming more and more centralised (no individual District Inspector could decide to reprogram the self-assessment computers, for example), a structure that allowed issues to be raised at a local level and then escalated where necessary to a national one was extremely valuable.
New model
This model hit problems, however, when HMRC was formed in 2005 and started to reorganise itself nationally based on particular functions rather than on local offices that handled most of the tax work for their geographical area.
If there were no local offices, or if the local office was a specialist one, the match between the office and the local agents was lost. As a result, many local groups fell by the wayside for a couple of years.
The problem was spotted, however, and since then there has been a concerted effort to rebuild the local group structure. Around 60 local groups are currently operating, and your nearest one can be found from the directory on HMRC’s website.
There has, additionally, been a revamp from the end of last year in the way that local groups are working, to reflect the fact that more issues now need to be referred up and handled on a national basis.
If an issue is to be referred up, a template has to be completed describing the issue and its impact, the number of agents that it is likely to affect, whether there is any way to work around it, and confirming that the group has taken responsibility for checking that the issue is not one that has already been explained by HMRC in their publications.
Each group continues to have representatives from some or all of the professional bodies which are invo
lved in Working Together: the CIOT, ICAEW, ACCA, ICAS, ATT and AAT. One of these representatives often acts as the ‘lead agent’, and a senior local HMRC manager will act as the lead for HMRC. Depending on what the local groups decide, one or the other of these will chair the group, or they will be jointly chaired.
They share responsibility for running the group and facilitating discussion. HMRC also provide a coordinator to act as the secretariat for the group, and to handle the first stage of issue resolution.
While the local Working Together groups are still face-to-face meetings, they also use electronic communication as much as possible, and the intention is that more and more use will be made of online services. This is how the report announcing the future of Working Together put it in December 2008:
‘On issue resolution, a system will be developed that will enable local groups to see what issues other groups are raising, to see what issues have been raised previously, to raise new issues or feed into the understanding of existing ones, and to track progress to resolution.
'Longer term, HMRC will aim to introduce an electronic based system that will enable individual members of local groups to view and interact directly with this system.
'A new Working Together communications area will be created to bring together all the communications Working Together needs. The principles of this will be that local groups should be able to see everything if they want to, but also be offered analysed and searchable summaries of top issues, FAQs, news, success stories etc.’
These local groups, feeding up into a national structure, are the basic building blocks of Working Together, and I would encourage you to get involved in a local group, or to refer issues to your local representative if you are a member of one of the institutes concerned.
However, issues do inevitably also get raised with the trade press, both in print and online. Until now we have not had any way of formally taking them further, but I am pleased to say that as from Tuesday this week we have.
Working Together e-groups
Both Taxation and AccountingWeb have agreed with HMRC to set up Working Together e-groups, which their readers can join.
As with the local Working Together groups, the aim of the new Working Together e-groups is to improve all areas of HMRC’s operations for the benefit of agents, advisers and their clients.
The practicalities of how we will generate and discuss issues are set out below, and they will naturally differ from the processes in the local groups (although they reflect the same principles), but in all other respects we will be the same as the local groups.
We will be responsible for identifying systemic HMRC operational problems or ‘issues’ based on evidence from customers, and our referrals will be in the same form as the local groups.
If you have an issue that you think needs to be raised through Working Together, please think first about doing so through your local group. If you would prefer to raise it through Taxation’s e-group, email it to Daniel Selwood, our online editor. Please be sure to include ‘Working Together’ as part of the subject line.
If it looks like it is a worthwhile issue, we will put it onto the ‘Forum and Feedback’ section of the website, clearly identified as a Working Together (WT) issue. If it is to go further, it then needs further input from readers.
First, we need to know whether this is a widespread problem.
Then we need to know whether anyone has found a way round it, and if so what the issues are with that workaround.
Finally, one or more readers needs to volunteer to check existing documentation to see if the issue is raised there. Only after all that has happened will it be possible for the issue to be entered onto the template and taken up at a higher level.
In order to take part in this work, simply leave your comments on the item as you would on any article.
However, please make sure that they are relevant – we need to know whether you are having the same problem, and whether you have found any solution.
We will moderate comments on these threads more closely than on others, and in particular please remember that this is about working together. Please comment as you would if you were face to face with HMRC colleagues; that is to say constructively rather than negatively.
There is a place in Taxation for rants and complaints, but it is in Feedback, not this new group. If you do not want to have your name attached to the comment, then email it to Daniel and we will put it up on the site, where appropriate.
This is not, therefore, an easier option compared to normal Working Together groups; participants will have to do much the same amount of work to move an issue forward using either type of group.
It will, however, allow agents who are not members of the main professional bodies to take part in a Working Together group more easily, and it may be a better forum for raising issues which are more specialist and may therefore need input from readers around the country to identify the scale of the problem and any possible solutions to it.
I hope this is going to take off as a valuable complement to the work currently being done by the geographical groups. If it does, we will probably give the group its own separate area on our website.
But it is only going to work if you, our readers, make it work. I look forward to hearing from you.
