Digital revolution at HMRC left 99,000 UK taxpayers on hold over five-day fiasco
Poor IT performance caused a five-day shutdown of the UK tax authority's phone services in December last year, affecting around 99,000 citizens.
According to the annual report for His Majesty's Revenue & Customs , during the 2022-2023 tax year, the government department's customer service was adversely affected by IT problems, particularly towards the end of 2022. "Between 1 and 5 December 2022, HMRC closed all of its telephone-based services due to poor call quality and the inability of advisers to access relevant information. Webchat was also unavailable at this time," official government auditors said inThe department estimated it would have handled around 99,000 calls from taxpayers at the time the telephone services were suspended. The specific cause was not revealed.
HMRC is in the middle of its Making Tax Digital transformation program, which kicked off in 2015. This is designed to"modernise HMRC's separate IT systems for three business taxes – VAT, Income Tax Self Assessment and Corporation Tax – and require business taxpayers to keep and submit quarterly digital tax records."that the initial time frame for the program was unrealistic and has since faced repeated delays and rephasing, undermining its credibility and increasing costs.
The tax agency said in the report that its Technology Sourcing Programme had achieved £11 million of efficiency savings in 2022-2023 – less than 1 percent of its lifetime budget of £7.1 billion –"by replacing existing IT contracts with new, more efficient services and suppliers."
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