Watchdog accuses HMRC of deliberately ‘degrading’ phone services
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Long call waiting times have ‘damaged trust in the tax system’, public accounts committee report says. Parliament’s spending watchdog has accused HM Revenue & Customs of deliberately running down its phone services to force people to go online after finding the average call waiting time has passed 23 minutes – almost double the figure of two years earlier.
With people across the country working to finish their self-assessment return before the 31 January deadline, the public accounts committee (PAC) said it was “concerned that HMRC has degraded its own phone services” in the hope that taxpayers choose other ways to get in touch.
MPs on the cross-party body said such treatment “has damaged trust in the tax system”, but HMRC hit back at the suggestion it had deliberately made its customer service worse, calling it a “completely baseless” accusation. In an unusually hard-hitting report, the PAC said after the “all-time low” of the previous year, the tax department’s customer service had gone on to plumb new depths in 2023-24 and needed to take responsibility for how it had failed its customers.
It said that in the first 11 months of that tax year, HMRC cut off 43,690 customers who had been waiting for 1 hour and 10 minutes to speak to an adviser – a 535% increase on the 6,875 who had their calls terminated after waiting that long in 2022-23.
The PAC and Whitehall spending watchdog the National Audit Office both issued scathing reports about HMRC’s customer service last year, but in its latest report, the committee of MPs said its “already poor service to taxpayers has become even worse” since then.
