Watchdog slams HMRC over shambolic digital flit

The NAO said taxpayers who were forced to hang on the phone while calling HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) had lost the collective equivalent of £97m last year.

The spending watchdog said call waiting times tripled after HMRC decided to cut 11,000 staff between 2010 and 2014, with some customers kept on hold for up to an hour.

As part of its strategy to persuade people to do their tax returns online, it had anticipated needing fewer employees to answer the phone.

While HMRC maintained or improved its customer service up to 2013-14, it then misjudged the overall impact of the complex transition and shed too many customer service staff before completing service changes, the NAO said.

And after call waiting times for self-assessment tax returns peaked at 47 minutes last autumn, HMRC was forced to bring in 2,400 staff to its tax helpline.

As part of its study in the debacle, the NAO worked out how much money callers would have notionally lost, while waiting for a reply.

Using HMRC’s own criteria, it valued people’s time at an average of £17 an hour.

As a result it claimed callers would have wasted the following sums:

Amyas Morse, head of the NAO, said: “HMRC’s overall strategy of using digitally enabled information to improve efficiency and deliver service in new ways makes sense to the NAO.

“This does not change the fact that they got their timing badly wrong in 2014, letting significant numbers of call handling staff go before their new approach was working reliably.

“This led to a collapse in service quality and forced a rapid expansion of headcount.

“HMRC needs to move forward carefully and get their strategy back on track while maintaining, and hopefully improving, service standards”.

Gillian Guy, chief executive of Citizens Advice, said: “Long waiting times not only cause frustration and increase the cost of the call, but can also mean people miss important deadlines.

“For example if you don’t return your tax form on time you face a fine - which for some households can be an additional cost they can’t afford to pay.”

In response, HMRC said most calls were now being answered in just six minutes.

Ruth Owen, HMRC’s director general for customer services, said: “We recognise that early in 2015 we didn’t provide the standard of service that people are entitled to expect and we apologised at the time.

“We have since fully recovered and are now offering our best service levels in years.”