HM Revenue & Customs has been given £200m to improve customer service. Winnie Agbonlahor reports on the progress so far.
HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has often made the news for losing billions in tax credit overpayments. These, of course, involve both errors by HMRC, and a failure to clear up the problem – and anyone who’s ever tried to get in touch with the revenue will know at least one of the reasons why the agency struggles to communicate with its service users. Customers phoning in are often put on hold for what feels like an eternity, and frequently simply give up: last year, just 75% of calls were answered by HMRC.
This lack of “customer-centricity” was the topic of a speech by Ruth Owen, the new director general at HMRC’s personal tax department, at Civil Service Live in Gateshead. “Those of you who’ve had contact with HMRC will realise it’s not always the customer that drives the way we run our business,” she said, adding: “I put my hand on my heart and say: I am not satisfied with the service we are offering to the citizens of this country. But we really want to change the organisation to be focused around the customer.”
Improving the customer experience, Owen said, will have multi-faceted benefits: HMRC will become a “great place to work”, with civil servants being “proud of the service they offer”. Meanwhile “people who want to pay their tax” will become more likely to do so, because “if we give the service [the customers] need, we will bring in more revenue – it is a ‘win win win’.”
Increasing revenue was also a key theme in last month’s spending review, in which chancellor George Osborne asked HMRC to bring in an additional £22bn in tax, whilst announcing that its work force will be cut from 65,000 to 52,000. However, it is not all gloom for staff at HMRC, which makes up 16% of the civil service: alongside all the dreaded cuts, Osborne also announced a £200m boost for HMRC’s improvement programme, which will seek to sharpen up customer service, cut red tape, and generate £40m in savings.
One key element of the transformation agenda will be a programme of work “breaking down the silos” within HMRC, so that the taxpayer will be treated as one individual, rather than different customers according to the service he or she uses.
As part of the programme, eventually “everyone will have an online account”, Owen said: individual customers will be able to carry out transactions such as making payments, viewing their tax codes, updating their personal details, and reporting additional sources of income. And small and medium-sized businesses will, by March 2016, be able to access nearly everything they need through a single personalised homepage, providing direct access to all their online tax transactions, a personalised tax calendar with digital alerts, and the ability to complete more transactions online.
Lin Homer, chief executive of HMRC, told CSW that the move towards more digital services will free up staff to “focus on the critical and more skilled jobs they need to do” and thus drive down delivery costs. Work on the programme, which will be overseen by the Major Projects Authority and the head of the civil service, Sir Bob Kerslake, is already underway. And success will be paramount, not only to increase the amount of money collected and “close the tax gap” – as Owen put it – but also, as Kerslake said, because “the public forms its view of the civil service from the direct service they receive from it”.