Adjudicator’s Office 2022-23 annual report

Looking at 2022-23 overall across all three organisations for which it deals with complaints the Adjudicator’s Office took on 1 085 cases for investigation resolved 957 complaints and has 369 on hand. It accepts complaints about HMRC the Valuation Office Agency and since December 2019 the Home Office Windrush compensation scheme although this aspect will not be covered in this article.

Disruption from the pandemic continues to have an effect on HMRC’s complaints performance said Helen Megarry in the foreword to her 2022-23 annual report – the seventh and final one of her tenure as adjudicator (tinyurl.com/adjrep202223). There are still ‘significant backlogs’ in some areas where ‘high volume complaints are not expected to recover until well into next year’. Indeed many taxpayers ‘are stuck’ in HMRC’s complaints system for a long time ‘with little or no meaningful response’ from the tax...