HMRC and the tax bodies share an enthusiasm to ‘press ahead’ with a new initiative to resolve longstanding HMRC service delivery issues, a leading expert has told Tax Journal.
HMRC have openly acknowledged ‘at the very top level’ that urgent change is required and that the tax bodies and charities have an essential contribution to make, the Low Incomes Tax Reform Group said.
Mike Clasper, HMRC’s Chairman, met representatives of the tax bodies earlier this month at their request, after the House of Commons Treasury Committee recommended that HMRC should work closely with the professional bodies, tax charities and businesses to improve service delivery.
‘Taking HMRC people out to see things at the customer “coalface” while at the same time giving agents a view inside HMRC shows a real and mutual commitment to openness ...’Paul Aplin, ICAEW Tax Faculty |
‘The intention is to pursue this initiative within a very stringent time frame to obtain tangible fast track results,’ HMRC and the tax bodies said in a joint statement today. Work is to be ‘taken forward quickly’ on post processing and handling.
Tax agents will spend time with HMRC’s front line service delivery teams to ‘look at processes in detail from a customer perspective and make recommendations’, and HMRC staff will visit agents’ offices to ‘gain an in depth understanding of service delivery as seen from a customer perspective’.
The announcement comes a day before HMRC are set to close a consultation on a strategy for engaging with tax agents. The ‘agent strategy’ was not intended as a substitute for improving service standards, HMRC told Tax Journal in June.
But the Treasury Committee warned in July of a serious risk that ‘if communicating with HMRC becomes too time-consuming, difficult and expensive, respect for the tax system, and with it voluntary compliance, may be undermined’.
Last month leading tax bodies called on HMRC to take deliberate steps to win the trust of tax agents, pointing out that many agents could not understand why HMRC were considering investing in a system to monitor agents when the department needed to focus on improving its services.
Paul Aplin, Chairman of the ICAEW Tax Faculty’s Technical Committee (pictured), told Tax Journal that today’s announcement was a direct response to a Treasury Committee recommendation that the Faculty had long pushed for – the establishment of performance measures that are ‘seen as credible by those who deal with HMRC’.
But today's statement went further, Aplin said. ‘It announces a programme designed to help HMRC see service delivery from a customer perspective and concentrating on some key problem areas. Taking HMRC people out to see things at the customer "coalface" while at the same time giving agents a view inside HMRC shows a real and mutual commitment to openness and a shared determination to tackle and resolve some of the issues highlighted in the Treasury Committee report.
‘Having been at the meeting Mike Clasper chaired at 100 Parliament Street last week I can attest to the shared enthusiasm to press ahead with this initiative.’
Mike Clasper said tax agents, and the charity and voluntary sector, were ‘vitally important customer and stakeholder groups for HMRC’.
‘I welcome their offer to work with us so we can better understand how to improve. We know that they and their clients are seriously impacted when we get things wrong and we are determined to deliver a better service.
‘We need to get a better understanding of the experiences of our customers and stakeholders and of their experiences in resolving tax issues. Working with agent colleagues inside and outside HMRC will provide that knowledge and lead to better services for all of our customers.’
The new exercise ‘is emphatically not a talking shop,’ the professional bodies and tax charities said in today's joint statement.
