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HMRC plan will cause even more disruption and may cause taxpayers to delay in sending their returns

If the Government is serious about making Britain an attractive place to do business, HMRC should be properly funded

HMRC’s special plan to deal with correspondence, which is over 12 months old is simply too little too late.

Global Mobility Director Robert Salter said: “The plan does nothing to resolve the service issues which are found throughout HMRC which are frustrating UK businesses and individuals and costing innocent taxpayers substantial amounts.

“The HMRC plan simply involves the Revenue pulling away resources from their phone lines and other teams to deal with the unanswered correspondence.

“The reality is without the helpline a lot of people who might well have prepared a tax return in the summer will not as they don’t have the safety net of a call to HMRC to guide them through.

“HMRC point to using online resources, but their search tool is poor and there is so much information on the website, even knowing what you are looking for it is hard to find. HMRC’s plans for making tax digital is just not working.

“As other HMRC teams will realistically have less resources while this special team for ‘old correspondence’ is operating one has to assume that the regular HMRC teams will be even slower in responding to outstanding enquiries, which in many cases may already be six or nine months old.

“This is simply a case of HMRC ‘robbing Peter, to pay Paul’. The approach isn’t addressing the fundamental issues faced by HMRC which include a lack of staff, often limited training, and poor technology.

“If the Government is serious about making Britain an attractive place to do business, it needs to ensure that HMRC is properly funded, so that they can be adequately resourced, trained and supported from an IT perspective.”

Would you like to know more?

If you would like to discuss the above, please get in touch with your usual Blick Rothenberg contact or with Robert Salter using the form below.

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