From later this week, HMRC is once again closing its corporation tax and VAT (excluding bereavement) phone helplines on Fridays, this time for one month commencing on Friday 25 February. The VAT helpline will remain open on Friday 4 March given the Monday 7 March filing deadline for VAT returns. The message from Jim Harra, Chief Executive, explaining this in more detail, is set out below. We would welcome your feedback on this decision which is the second time this has occurred since December.
“Over the course of the pandemic, HMRC made choices about the work we prioritised to protect our essential services and the livelihoods of our customer groups who needed it the most. We prioritised the COVID support schemes, the UK’s smooth transition from the European Union and the essential services that keep the tax system running.
In the first half of the year, we focused on stabilising our phone services and our tax credits/child benefit service, while we maintained our customs services well within targets and supported the smooth running of the COVID support schemes until they closed in October 2021. We are now working through the stocks of post that built up over the past year.
During December, we ran a test and learn on the Corporation Tax (CT) and VAT helplines (except bereavement) to assess the impact of telephony closure across three Fridays and used the time to focus on our post backlogs in these lines.
On average, we cleared more than 4,000 additional pieces of post each day during the test and learn. We saw an increased productivity rate among colleagues, above our initial planning assumptions, who were able to focus on the task without stopping mid-way through to take a phone call.
As anticipated, we saw an increase in telephony contact on Monday’s following the Friday closures, and estimate we received 2,500 extra calls over the three Mondays (using November as a comparator). We were able to offer an acceptable level of service to these customers despite the additional demand.
Our stakeholders were broadly supportive of the pilot and our colleagues were clear in their support of this approach and the focus on recovering post.
Following the success of the December test and learn, the CT and VAT telephony lines will see a further telephony shuttering exercise on Fridays in February and March 2022:
- CT - 25 February to 25 March 2022
- VAT (excluding bereavement) - 25 February to 25 March 2022 (excluding 4 March)
We’ve listened to feedback from our stakeholders and we've selected these dates to avoid key events on these lines, including the VAT peak. This will allow us to maintain our customer service levels throughout the rest of the week.
Based on current plans, we expect to see a significant improvement in our service levels in these critical areas.
We are still considering how our learning could be used to help other telephony lines within our business in the future.”
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