LONDON: The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) polled to find out if HMRC is succeeding in improving the standards of its service, nine out of 10 accountants said that despite all the efforts of Britain’s Revenue & Customs, it has not become any cheaper or easier to file a tax return and a nearly a third say it has become harder.
But over half the firms polled said they do not trust HMRC to ‘get it right first time’.
The results will feed the fears of politicians who warned last month that HMRC risked a repeat of the “catastrophic collapse” in customer service of two years ago when at one point the average time it took to answer a phone call peaked at 47 minutes.
The ICAEW said it was disappointed that so many accountants had not seen an improvement in the service or cost of dealing with HMRC. “This result is all the more surprising given that HMRC’s own performance statistics to September 2016 show a steadily improving performance in the previous 12 months.”
An “increasingly complicated and constantly changing tax system” was also making it difficult to maintain service standards, it said. Recent changes included the introduction of the marriage allowance and tweaks to the way national insurance contributions are collected.
It also pointed out that the improvements in telephone response times would not have made a difference to advisers because they used a dedicated line that had not involved long waiting times in the past.
The findings were rejected by Revenue & Customs which said they did not “reflect the reality of our service levels”. HMRC is facing having to improve its service while simultaneously cutting over 10,000 jobs, moving the tax system online, and relocating most of its staff to new office “hubs”.
HMRC said: “In every month of the year we’ve beaten our targets for both the speed and percentage of answered calls — with 90 per cent of calls answered first time in less than five minutes on average.
