HMRC call-handling shows improvement

Around 16 million phone calls to HMRC went unanswered between April 2009 and February 2010, a marked improvement on recent performance, according to Stephen Timms.

In a reply to a parliamentary question, the financial secretary to the Treasury said a new system introduced last June had allowed the Revenue to make strides in reducing the number of taxpayers who are unable to get through to the department: 16.4 million over ten months was a notable reduction compared to the 43.7 million unanswered calls in the whole of 2008/09.

A range of prerecorded messages had allowed callers to get the information they require without the need for interaction with an operator. In the period from last April to February this year, five million calls had been handled by the automated service, said Mr Timms, who provided figures that showed that the average time for calls to be answered had been 1 minute and 29 seconds.

This suggested a significant improvement to answering times when compared to 2008/09, when the average period was almost two minutes.

HMRC were criticised earlier this year for failing to efficiently handle queries from taxpayers and agents. A report from the National Audit Office (NAO) showed that the Revenue’s performance in answering phone calls during 2008/09 was well below both the department’s own targets and industry standards.

The NAO did, however, highlighted signs of improvement in 2009/10: the percentage of calls answered in the first half of the year risen to 73%.

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