.png)
.png)
KEY POINTS
- Change at the top may mean HMRC’s use of ‘customer’ can be challenged.
- For practical purposes, it can be replaced by ‘taxpayer’ and ‘claimant’.
- HMRC should revert to a professional civil service model, rather than copying business.
- Sign the e-petition.
HMRC are going through a massive personnel change this year. Not only do they have a new CEO in Lin Homer, they are recruiting for a new chairperson, and a replacement for their top tax professional as Dave Hartnett retires.
Other senior leaders such as Revenue Commissioners Mike Eland and Stephen Banyard are also leaving.
One of the advantages of a change at the top is the incoming management does not have such a vested interest in the decisions of the previous administration. So, is it too much to hope that the new team will finally abandon the ridiculous attempt to persuade us all that we are ‘customers’ of HMRC?
The use of the word customer to describe taxpayers dates from before the merger of the Inland Revenue and Customs & Excise, but it seems to have become ubiquitous at around that time to describe those with whom the new department interacted.
I say ubiquitous: it was invariably the word that appeared in press releases, and it gradually replaced ‘taxpayers’ in the HMRC manuals.
But even after almost a decade of use, I have never once heard a tax adviser call someone an HMRC customer rather than a taxpayer. Here at Taxation, we routinely alter news stories from HMRC so that they refer to taxpayers rather than customers.
I have also never heard a ‘coalface’ HMRC officer refer to a customer either, and suspect they dislike the term just as much as the profession does.
We are all fully aware that when we deal with HMRC we are not customers at all. We are not buying anything from them, and we do not have a choice about whether to interact with them.
We cannot, except in certain complicated double taxation scenarios, decide to pay our taxes to the American IRS or to collect our benefits from the French Securité Sociale.
Someone who is being investigated for serious fraud is not a customer of the unit that is carrying out the investigation, nor should they be treated as one.
Some might argue that, although inaccurate, the use of the word ‘customer’ by HMRC is unimportant. It is important if it makes me wince every time I read it, because it distracts my attention from what follows.
It is also important for the reason given by George Orwell in his seminal essay Politics and the English Language: ‘The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts’.
Not just taxpayers
So why do HMRC persist in using the term when it shows no sign of gaining traction outside their own documents, resulting in a strange schism in which the profession and the department seem to be talking different languages? HMRC have given two different reasons.
The first reason, and by far the dominant one until recently, was that ever since HMRC took on responsibility for areas such as National Insurance and tax credits, ‘taxpayers’ is too narrow a description of the people they deal with. The second, which appears to have only been used in public more recently, is that calling the people they are dealing with ‘customers’ is meant to make HMRC officers adopt a ‘customer service’ mentality in doing so.
The first reason, if it were genuine, would have the merit of being a practical one. It is certainly true that HMRC often deal with people other than in their capacity as taxpayers.
Nor is it enough to say that we are all taxpayers because we all pay VAT on our purchases: if HMRC are contacting you as a tax credit claimant, then it is not appropriate to refer to you as a taxpayer.
It is, however, appropriate to refer to you as a claimant, and I cannot immediately think of any situation where neither taxpayer nor claimant would be appropriate (except, perhaps, the example of serious fraud that I gave above, where ‘suspect’ would be more appropriate).
Even more to the point, I can think of few situations where both are needed. If HMRC are contacting you about your tax affairs, you are a taxpayer (and that is still the case even for zero-rated VAT businesses, since they are reclaiming the VAT they have already paid).
And if they are contacting you about your National Insurance contributions, then you should be referred to as a taxpayer as well, since that is really what the contributions are. If they are contacting you about tax credits, you are a claimant.
In most cases it should be possible to refer either to taxpayers or to claimants. In a few high-level documents it might be necessary to refer to both.
I see no real reason why they should not simply say ‘taxpayers and claimants’, or use a generic term that it is relevant to the particular subject under discussion (correspondents, contacts, users, members of the public), but if senior management feel an overwhelming desire to say ‘customers’ when talking to each other, it probably doesn’t do too much harm, provided they stop using it when talking to taxpayers, claimants and their advisers.
Customer service
That they haven’t already done so, and persist in calling us customers, suggests that something else is behind the use of the term.
While it is only recently that HMRC have explicitly defended it on the basis that it encourages officers to think of ‘customer service’, the use of such management-speak has been rampant for some time in the department’s strategy documents.
Taxpayers are split into ‘customer streams’, the levels of ‘customer service’ are analysed and reported on, and software developers look at ‘customer journeys’ through HMRC’s online services... I’m sorry, their ‘online offering’...
The justification for this was that it was a much-needed change in approach for HMRC staff, and would result in a significantly better level of service for taxpayers and claimants.
It clearly hasn’t, though that may be due in large part to the fact that the department is trying to make do with far fewer staff. However, there is also a fundamental flaw in the concept.
HMRC seem to have bought the line from business that what they want to do is provide great service to their customers.
Actually what business wants to do is to make profit from its customers. That involves giving the customers who pay the most the best levels of service, while trying to automate the process for lower-value customers, thus stripping out costs.
It is no surprise that in a ‘customer-centric’ HMRC, the one area getting rave reviews is the Large Business Service, with the High Net Worth Unit beginning to garner grudging praise as well.
Nor is it any surprise that the average taxpayers (and their advisers) get a process-driven level of service from call centres – they simply are not worth putting more resources into because they don’t produce as much revenue.
What businesses also want to do is to maximise the amount of money they get from each customer. Is this why HMRC started talking a while ago about getting the ‘maximum’ amount of tax, rather than the ‘right’ amount of tax?
Because, for all that Andrew Tyrie MP cleverly finessed the issue at the CTA address by saying that the right amount of tax was the maximum amount of tax, the two concepts are fundamentally different.
Civil servants
I don’t want HMRC to treat me as a customer. In fact, I don’t want the focus to be on me at all, I want it to be on them and their staff. What I want is for my tax affairs to be handled by civil servants, in all senses of that phrase.
What I mean by it most of all is that I want government departments to stop playing at being businesses and to return to the traditional values of the professional civil service.
While that might carry certain negative connotations of being bureaucratic and pen-pushing, those are outweighed by the positive ones of being independent, professional, fully trained, having great integrity, and providing a public service.
Those are the values Dave Hartnett was defending when refusing to breach taxpayer confidentiality under questioning from the Public Accounts Committee. They are not the values of a ‘customer-centric’ organisation, because you only please customers to make more money out of them.
Campaign
I think it is time for us to campaign for HMRC to stop referring to us, and our clients, as customers. Fortunately, there is already a petition on the government’s e-petitions site calling for exactly this.
Unfortunately it has only two signatures at the time of writing, and the person who set it up (who seems to be a disgruntled taxpayer) has probably despaired of it getting to the 100,000 necessary to be in the running for a parliamentary debate.
If, however, all of our readers were to sign it, and then asked their clients to sign it, we would smash that figure easily. I’m off now to become the third signatory to the petition. I hope you’ll join me as soon as you have finished reading this.
