HMRC: No extra help for customer service

CIOT’s Tax Policy Director, Ellen Milner, said: ‘We remain concerned that, in a Budget about fixing the foundations, no additional investment has been made to underpin the commitment to improve HMRC’s customer service.’ She said that poor service levels are continuing to have a detrimental impact on the tax system as a whole, the ability to do business and the wider economy.

This followed a joint call by CIOT and ICAEW ahead of the Budget for the Chancellor to make such an investment. That call followed emerging findings of a study of tax agents’ contact with HMRC, conducted jointly by CIOT and ICAEW during September and October 2024.

The study found that while 85% of attempts to contact HMRC across a range of helplines and webchats got through to an adviser, a quarter of issues raised through helplines and webchats go unresolved, while in 41% of cases, agents needed to contact HMRC again.

The full findings of the survey will be published in December and will be reported in an article in the next Tax Adviser.