At the start of October, HMRC advised us that its VAT426 team was testing a solution that would allow it to significantly increase the number of payments that it could make, enabling it to progress cases and payments to IPs. This has helped to address the issues that the team has faced with the movement of work and redeployment of staff.
Since then, HMRC has confirmed that the team has not only been able to reduce its backlogs to within Service Level Agreements, but has gone beyond that, and is now working current cases. There remain a few hundred cases that are more complex and require further intervention so IPs will be contacted by the team to resolve these, rather than just having them rejected.
Over the next few weeks IPs should start to see payments coming out as its Finance teams are now processing several hundred payments per day.
We would like to hear from IPs whether they feel there has been an improvement with the speed their cases and payments are being processed - please notify us by the filling out this form.