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How tough should HMRC be with taxpayers who have payment arrears? It has recently published a research report which looks at the reactions of different groups of taxpayers to various letter styles (tinyurl.com/ye2dzter).
The sample base is low and some of the jargon off-putting – ‘blip customer’ anyone? – but it is right that HMRC looks at how it communicates. There is a tendency for those of us who work in tax to assume that everybody knows what specific terms mean, but often people do not. A good example comes from work done with micro-businesses. HMRC was asking about business receipts – a term we would understand to mean income. But almost everybody took it to mean receipts for expenses. Not surprisingly the result was great confusion.
Tone as well as content is important. Perhaps not surprisingly the expression ‘we will be monitoring you’ did not go down well. Simple things like using bold text intelligently or making sure that key information is prominently displayed can make a real difference.
The report is worth reading, not least because it may prompt thoughts about how we communicate with our clients, in particular when we have to give difficult messages.
I am sure every reader has at least one client who has said something similar.
