When Jim Harra joined the Inland Revenue in 1984, it was only supposed to be a summer job. After all, he would soon be starting a master’s in patent law at Queen Mary College in London. Instead, he never left. And 40 years later he is retiring with a knighthood, as the top official at HM Revenue and Customs – the successor to the Inland Revenue and HM Customs and Excise.
In a large, modern meeting room in the grand corridors of 100 Parliament Street, Whitehall – which has been HMRC’s HQ for the last 20 years – Harra recalls the “immense” changes in his four-decade-long career spent entirely at the tax authority.
“Back then, it was a hugely paper-based organisation based in hundreds of little local offices,” he says. “Today, we have 14 regional centres and a few specialist sites, and are dealing with a much larger tax system with far fewer staff.”
One of the biggest changes has been the development of digital self-service, Harra says. “When I joined the Inland Revenue, as it then was, taxpayers couldn’t deal directly with the tax system; they had to deal with civil servants who intermediated between them and the tax system,” he says. “Whereas today, they can just go online and do things for themselves.”
Harra says the change he particularly could never have anticipated at the start of his career was that people would one day have a tax system on their mobile phones. HMRC’s app had more than 100 million sessions last year and is rapidly growing. “The idea that you could do your tax return and pay your tax on your phone, I would never have dreamed in 1984 that you could do that,” he says.
“That image of a middle-aged guy in a pinstripe suit really does not fit the modern HMRC that we are”
Born and raised in Donaghcloney, a small village in Northern Ireland, Harra began his career in Belfast as an inspector of taxes. Three and a half decades on, still on the payroll of the UK’s tax administration, he would become the man in charge, running a workforce of around 70,000 staff. A few months into the top job, he found himself suddenly navigating those staff – and the British public – through a global pandemic.
Harra says the way the department responded to the Covid-19 crisis is the proudest moment of his career. “Very quickly, we established new tax policies to support people. We also put in place the furlough scheme to support jobs and the self-employed support scheme as well, in really, really quick time, as well as keeping the tax system going and all while pivoting to working from home – sending 65,000 people to work from home – which was all done in a week or so.
“So I think I felt at that time: ‘I’ve either put the capabilities and empowered people in place to do this or I haven’t.’ And I clearly had because it all worked. That was a really proud moment for me.”
The most difficult moment came at the midway point in his career. Harra easily recalls the specific day: “6 April 2003, when the system didn’t work”. On that day, New Labour’s flagship tax credit schemes (child tax credit and working tax credit) went live – but the computer system failed. Hundreds of thousands of claimants were not paid on time, and many were overpaid. Now-defunct American IT firm EDS, which was charged with delivering the system, did not achieve a stable system until after 10 weeks of live operations.
Harra, who was director of tax credit operations at the Inland Revenue at the time, says the failure affected millions of people. “Whilst I was very proud of how we recovered from that crisis and supported the customers, nevertheless, we did not do a good job for people in the way we implemented that, and colleagues had a really tough time when they should have had a time they were really proud of,” he says.
With an uninterrupted career at the department, Harra has spent four decades as “the taxman” – a bit of a bogeyman figure in the national imagination. From The Beatles’ 1966 song Taxman – protesting tax increases under Harold Wilson’s Labour government – to Daily Mail headlines today which warn that “the taxman” is “set to rake in £1tn”, how has it felt to be the figurehead of an institution that people love to hate? And how do people react at parties when he tells them his job?
“People probably will always hate paying their taxes, even if they understand that it’s something they need to do,” Harra says. “The reaction at parties tends to be, first of all, ‘oh’, a step back, and then, ‘I’ve got a problem with my tax code, can you help me?’” While Harra understands why people use the nickname, he says it can be a hindrance. “I think the taxman has always been a recognisable shorthand for the tax administration,” he says. “And I suspect it will be for a long time, thanks to The Beatles and people like them. “But that image of a middle-aged guy in a pinstripe suit really does not fit the modern HMRC that we really are,” he adds.
“So sometimes I regret that people can’t see it’s a really diverse place with all different kinds of professional jobs – data analytics, cybersecurity, digital services, customer support, counter-fraud work – and I certainly want to make sure that young people thinking of careers can see HMRC as an exciting place to work where they can gain skills and also where they’ll meet a really diverse workforce of people that reflects the community they serve.”
“For me, as a gay man, it was important to be visible as a senior person in the civil service”
This wasn’t always the case. “I can remember when I started, working in an office next to a woman who was just about to retire and she’d had to make a choice between being married or having a job because you weren’t allowed to have both,” Harra says. “So it’s come a huge, huge way over the years.”
For a large chunk of his time at HMRC, Harra has been the department’s LGBT+ champion, promoting an inclusive workplace for LGBT+ colleagues, inclusive service provision for LGBT+ customers, and sharing good practice across the civil service. It is something he clearly feels strongly about: “It is important for public services to be diverse and reflect the communities they serve, and also if you’re diverse, you are able to make sure that the needs of different people are taken into account when you’re designing your services, for example,” he says. “So whether it is LGBT or disability or age – whatever – I think just championing, making sure you’ve got that workforce that reflects your community is very important, particularly for a public service.”
But it is important to him on a personal level too. “For me, as a gay man, it was also important to be visible as a senior person in the civil service and to show other people that there are no barriers in this organisation to getting to the top,” he says.
“Years ago, when I joined in Northern Ireland, homosexuality had only just been decriminalised a few years earlier so lots of people were in the closet. I think, particularly for senior people, there were no out gay people that I was aware of, and I wouldn’t want that to be the case today. So I think things have come on leaps and bounds, but you’ve got to keep working on it all the time.”
As the government’s third-largest department, HMRC is always going to feel the glare of public and political attention. But, for Harra, criticism in a recent report by the Public Accounts Committee of the department’s approach to customer service went too far to go unchallenged.
In a fiery exchange of letters with PAC chair Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, published alongside the report on 22 January, Harra slammed PAC’s claim that HMRC had provided a “deliberately poor” level of customer service on its telephone lines as “baseless”. The chair responded by defending the committee’s “right to raise concerns” and saying “the appropriate way to respond… is in detail through the Treasury minute process”.
Explaining to CSW why he decided to make a public intervention, Harra says: “Clearly as a public body we’re subject to scrutiny and I think that’s a really good thing, and our customer service levels have not been where we want them to be, so we can rightly be scrutinised and criticised for that, and I wouldn’t have commented on that. “But there was a claim that we had deliberately degraded our services, which is not the case, and I couldn’t let that sit on the record. Obviously, the government does get to respond formally to Public Accounts Committee reports in due course, but a press release was going out that day and I felt I had to refute what it said.”
People Survey woes
In the 2024 Civil Service People Survey results, HMRC came bottom in the headline engagement index among the major departments, with a score of 56%. And just 44% of HMRC officials told the survey that they feel proud when they tell people they work for the tax authority – the lowest among all government organisations
Harra says he is “disappointed” and “clearly not satisfied” with the results. He says there are some results in the survey “to take comfort from”, such as staff’s enjoyment of their jobs; while he picks out senior management’s ability to deliver change as an area that the department needs to get better at.
CSW asks if the low levels of pride could be related to the taxman’s “bogeyman” reputation. Harra doesn’t think this is the case. “I think people in HMRC show a very strong connection with the department’s purpose,” he says. “We’re here to raise the money that pays for the UK’s public services. I think that is something that our people feel strongly about. I think it’s probably more likely to do with: we have not been giving good customer service levels for the last few years and our people want to do a good job – and they’re not proud if a caller comes through after they’ve been hanging on for a long time. We’ve now got call wait times down 17 minutes and hopefully people will feel prouder about that.”
Another occasion Harra went toe-to-toe with MPs was during a Treasury Committee session in April 2024, where he made clear that helpline advisers working from home were no less productive than those working in the office. In a defiant performance, he clashed with then-committee member and former environment secretary Thérèse Coffey, accusing her of making “several gross distortions” over pay, efficiency and productivity, which he said needed to be corrected “one by one”.
CSW asks Harra how he has navigated the tension that the home working debate brings. “People have strong views about things, but my view is I always need to give the evidence, and I always stand up for our people if I think they’re being unfairly criticised,” he says. HMRC is “an office-based organisation” and has “invested a lot of money in recent years in creating really brilliant regional centres that have got great environments in them for people to collaborate in,” Harra adds. “So I do want people to come into the office,” he says. “But we know that colleagues really value the flexibility of being able to work from home. We know, particularly for the helplines and our correspondence teams, where you can measure people’s productivity, that we get as good productivity from those people when they’re working from home as when they’re in the office. So I’m happy, given that it is a popular policy which helps us to recruit and retain people… to defend it.”
One of the “gross distortions” that Harra countered in that committee session was Coffey’s comment that HMRC staff have had “considerably higher pay rises than the rest of the civil service on the basis of productivity”. Harra pointed out that he’d just given nearly a third of his staff a pay rise to prevent their salaries falling below the National Living Wage. This was “not a position” that he wanted to be in, he said, “just in case people were left with the false impression that we are paying people very high salaries”.
How can departments get out of that cycle of needing to use a large proportion of their pay pots to keep salaries at the legal minimum? “I think it’s a challenge for us and it’s not a resolved one,” Harra says. “In recent years, the National Living Wage has risen faster than civil service pay rises, and that means that people, for example in AA and AO grades, are having to get annual increases to keep up with the National Living Wage.” He says an inflation-busting three-year pay deal agreed in 2021, alongside a package of contract reforms, broke that cycle; but subsequent pay adjustments have meant “we’re back in that position again after a short time”.
Out of office
Like most people who work in central London, Harra says he has a fairly long commute. “I like to use my commute to decompress… I don’t like working on the tube on the way home,” he says. “I like listening to my podcasts and then by the time I get home, I’ve left the office behind.” The Rest is History and Where There’s a Will There’s a Wake are among his favourites: “I like some comedy and some history.” Until recently he had two dogs, and he hopes to get some more after his retirement. “It’s always nice to come home to have a wagging tail at the door greeting you,” he says.
This year, HMRC is holding a series of events to celebrate its 20th anniversary. Harra says this will be an opportunity to “celebrate how much we’ve changed in those 20 years since the old Customs and Excise and Inland Revenue came together. I suspect the majority of people in the organisation weren’t here 20 years ago like I was, so they’ll be learning something new,” he adds.
What made him stay so long?
“HMRC has a vital purpose,” he says. “And it is a huge, complex organisation that offers a wide variety of challenging jobs. So it has always given me roles that are rewarding and that develop and stimulate me. Why go anywhere else?”
Looking ahead to HMRC’s future beyond his stewardship, Harra expects the department will continue to increase its focus on improving digital services and helping customers to self-serve, and to couple that with having “really skilled advisers who deal with people who need extra help”. The department will also be “bearing down all the time” on the tax gap, he adds. The government is funding 5,000 extra tax compliance officers at HMRC over the next five years, along with 1,800 additional debt-collection officers. Harra says this is a “real opportunity” for the department and that he believes “we can show a very good return on investment for the government”.
As for his own future, Harra says he doesn’t have any post-government plans yet but adds: “I can’t imagine that I’m just going to put on my slippers and relax. I’m sure I’ll do something – not full time – but hopefully I’ll be able to bring the skills I’ve learned in the civil service to bear to help organisations, perhaps charities.”
His successor, current Scottish Government perm sec JP Marks, will take over as HMRC boss in April.
“I really welcome JP’s appointment,” Harra says. “He’s already been engaging with the department ahead of him joining, so hopefully it’ll be a warm handover.”
With a smile, he adds: “I’ll certainly be leaving him a little note telling him the good things and the bad things, but that’s between me and him.”