Have your say on HMRC performance

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ICAEW and other professional bodies are gathering feedback on HMRC’s performance through a survey. The Tax Faculty also looks at HMRC’s latest quarterly performance report.

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The Charter Stakeholder Group has prepared a survey, that runs to 8 March 2024, to obtain feedback on HMRC's performance against the standards in the HMRC Charter.

The HMRC Charter standards are:

getting things right;
making things easy;
being responsive;
treating you fairly;
being aware of your personal situation;
recognising that someone can represent you; and
keeping your data secure.

The survey results will form a key part of the group’s feedback on HMRC's performance against the Charter. This will be published in the Charter annual report and the detailed feedback will be shared (anonymously) with HMRC. The survey should take no more than ten minutes to complete and includes space for freeform comments. Input is welcome from individuals, businesses and agents by the 8 March 2024 deadline.

A list of the Charter Stakeholder Group members and last year’s feedback is available here. ICAEW is represented by Caroline Miskin.

HMRC performance October – December 2023

Meanwhile, HMRC has published a quarterly performance report for October - December 2023. Performance is largely unchanged and still below targets.

The key performance indicators are as follows:

	Sep to Dec 2023	Jul to Sep 2023	Apr 2022 to Mar 2023	Target
Customer Satisfaction	79%	79%	79%	80%
Customer correspondence cleared within 15 working days	76%	74%	73%	80%
Customer correspondence cleared within 40 working days	not yet available	85%	89%	95%
Net easy score	+60	+60	+60	+70
Telephones: adviser attempts handled	71%	69%	71%	85%
Telephones: average speed of answer	23 minutes	23 minutes	16 minutes	None
Telephones: callers waiting for more than 10 minutes	69%	70%	63%	None

Additionally, the level of HMRC debt as at December 2023 was £45.7bn, up from £45.5bn at September 2023. Despite this increase, the amount of debt in time to pay arrangements has fallen from £7.8bn to £6.6bn, and the number of taxpayers with arrangements has dropped from 888,863 to 808,025. This would be a worrying trend were it to continue.

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