HMRC published a collection of reports and documents on 17 July 2025, including its annual report and accounts, which analyses its performance in 2024/25 together with how it performed against its charter standards. ICAEW’s Tax Faculty has selected the details most likely to be of interest to taxpayers and agents dealing with HMRC on a day-to-day basis.

New digital services for 2025/26

The annual report sets out some of HMRC’s transformation plans, such as new digital services that it aims to deliver in 2025/26. These include:

• improving the digital self assessment (SA) registration service and making the process simpler for taxpayers who want to inform HMRC that they no longer need to file a SA return;
• adding new digital self-serve options into the PAYE digital service to enable taxpayers to notify HMRC of income changes, check what allowances or deductions they are receiving and ensure they are paying the correct amount of tax; and
• introducing digital tracking services. For example, HMRC plans to deliver technology that will enable child benefit claimants to track their claims and view their payments in real time.

However, in its part of the report, the Charter Stakeholder Group said that agents had reiterated “that they cannot access all the information that their clients can see – or do everything that their clients can do online” (see page 117). It is therefore frustrating that there is no mention of these services being available to tax agents. This means that the gap between digital services available to taxpayers and to tax agents is likely to grow.

The key digital investment for agents is the £36m allocated to modernise HMRC’s tax adviser registration services that was announced at the Autumn Budget 2024. It is hoped that this will provide the foundation for improved digital services for agents.

HMRC’s performance against targets

Alongside its annual report, HMRC has published and commented on its performance statistics for 2024/25.

The key performance indicators are:  

Of the six targets shown above, only compliance yield was met for 2024/25. HMRC no longer treats average speed of answer and callers waiting for more than 10 minutes as priority metrics. Both measures have improved since the £51m targeted investment that was announced in May 2024. However, this is a narrow measure of the quality of service. The decline in speed of handling correspondence reflects feedback from ICAEW members, particularly in respect of delays in processing tax repayments.

In December 2024, ICAEW and the Chartered Institute of Taxation (CIOT) published a joint report highlighting the issues agents faced in dealing with HMRC, based on a six-week study. A key finding was that, even when the agent was successful in making contact with HMRC, they were only able to fully resolve their query in 34% of cases. ICAEW and CIOT made 10 recommendations in the report for improving HMRC’s customer services.

More people are interacting digitally with HMRC. For example, HMRC’s app gained 2.8million new users and was used by almost six million unique users. Use of webchat declined, but this was overtaken by the increase in interactions with HMRC’s automated digital assistant. Overall, 76.2% of customer service interactions with HMRC were made through automated or digital self-serve channels (up from 73.2% in 2023/24). HMRC’s intends to reach 90% by 2029/30.

The level of tax debt at March 2025 was £44.0bn, with £6.8bn in time to pay arrangements and £37.2bn available for collection. Approximately 913,000 taxpayers have time to pay arrangements. Although tax debt has been reduced since the pandemic, it remains at a historically high level. 

HMRC’s performance against the charter 

HMRC’s charter sets out the standards of service that taxpayers and agents should expect from HMRC.  

The annual report includes the results of research commissioned by HMRC on its performance against the charter (see page 32 onwards). There has been a fall in the percentage of agents, individuals and small businesses who positively rated their overall experience of interacting with HMRC. For example, 33% of agents give a positive rating in the 2024 survey, compared with 37% in 2023.  

The annual report also includes the results of a survey undertaken by the Charter Stakeholder Group (see page 115 onwards). The survey asked respondents to give a score out of 10 for HMRC’s performance against each of the charter standards, with one being the lowest and 10 the highest. The survey received 551 responses, mainly from agents.  

The three standards that can be said to represent the ‘health’ of the tax system received the lowest average scores, although all three improved on 2023. These are: 

• being responsive: 3.0;
• making things easy: 3.3; and
• getting things right: 4.1. 

In addition, 82% of respondents did not think that HMRC is held sufficiently accountable for its performance against the charter. For example, concerns were raised that HMRC makes too many basic errors and “lacks accountability, since poor customer service can prevent agents and taxpayers from resolving these errors, resulting in the taxpayer being penalised”.

Higher scores were recorded for the remaining five charter standards, which can be said to address the context in which HMRC operates. These include recognising that someone can represent you (6.0) and keeping your data secure (7.0).

Compliance technical notes

Technical notes concerning compliance were also published alongside the report. These include: 

• an explanation of the relationship between compliance yield, tax receipts and the tax gap; 
• snapshots of tax under consideration at 31 March 2025; 
• criminal and civil case data; and 
• tax by customer group (including yield and cost of compliance activities by group).