Pity the taxman. As reviled professions go, it’s up there with estate agents, traffic wardens and, er, journalists.
Now comes the news that more than three million people may have paid the wrong tax after chaos at HM Revenue & Customs left callers waiting for over an hour to speak to staff last year. In a stinging report, the National Audit Office said that the quality of service at HMRC ‘collapsed’ over an 18-month period between 2014 and 2015.
Call waiting times tripled during that time, as some customers were kept on hold for up to an hour. One in five callers – 4.2 million people – hung up after waiting an average of 16 minutes each for an answer.
As well as the inconvenience and cost to the individual, there’s also the matter of the impact on the public purse. Using HMRC’s own criteria, it valued people’s time at an average of £17 an hour. As a result, callers wasted the following amounts: £66 million while waiting on the phone; £21 million talking to HMRC; £10 million on the cost of the call. That’s a dent to the economy of £97 million, up by 50 per cent in three years.
For the love of god, what is going on at HMRC? The National Audit Office lays the blame on a Revenue decision to cut 11,000 staff between 2010 and 2014.
According to today’s Telegraph, the chaos prompted HMRC to redirect 2,400 staff to man the phones at its call centres, which in turn meant they had to ‘defer essential work to maintain PAYE records’. The National Audit Office said that meant that the number of discrepancies between PAYE and self-assessment returns doubled, leaving a risk that 3.2 million people had ‘paid the wrong amount of tax’.
I’ve been on the receiving end of HMRC incompetence. Back in January, a few weeks before I was due to file my latest tax return, a letter came out of blue informing me that, a year earlier, I’d made a small error on my form. The taxman had just realised this and wanted thousands of pounds toute suite. Thousands of extra pounds just a couple of weeks before I was due to pay thousands of pounds in self-assessment.
I file my own form every year but for some reason I’d neglected to tick one box. So I organised a six-month payment plan to make good on my debt. Oh, but now there was a penalty running into hundreds of pounds for not responding to their demand straightaway. I gritted my teeth and paid that too.
Or did I? After waiting an age on the phone to make said payment, I spoke to the so-called helpline. An hour later I was none the wiser but the Revenue employee assured me I’d settled the fee and sorted the monthly direct debits.
That’s when the threatening letters started. Every couple of weeks I received increasingly heavy-handed missives demanding I pay my penalty. I rang the Revenue again.
Another long wait and another long conversation. It turned out my initial ‘helper’ had made mistakes with my account, hence the barrage of post. I paid my fee again, set up the payment plan again, and was once again told everything was dealt with.
The letters continued to come. Now there were threats of passing my outstanding liability to independent debt collectors. I’ll be honest, this was all a bit intimidating. I rang the Revenue for a third time.
I was told that the second ‘helper’ had also made errors. As a result I had paid my fine twice and my monthly repayments were too high. Yet another hour on the phone to sort this out and get my money back.
Since then, no more letters. But my faith in HMRC to deal with even the simplest of problems has hit rock bottom. It also begs the question that if the taxman can’t handle a £500 fee, how on earth does it manage to chase the fraudsters who owe millions in unpaid tax?
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