Last week HMRC held its first full face to face stakeholder conference since 2019 in London. The Institute was in attendance at the conference which opened with a speech by HMRC CEO, Jim Harra, in which he apologised for the inconvenience caused to taxpayers and agents alike by HMRC’s poor service levels. Mr Harra also referred to several specific “hotspots” which affected HMRC performance in 2022 and mentioned a number of continuing challenges including limited and falling real time budgets, and the current inflationary environment, both of which continue to impact service levels.
It was clear from Mr Harra’s speech that HMRC is very keen to enable taxpayers and agents to move to “self-serve” online as much as possible and this was further evidenced during workshop sessions held later in the day which examined HMRC’s ambitions for introducing new agent and taxpayer digital services in 2023 to reduce the need for contact by phone/post.
The conference workshops also looked at the issue of simplification now that the Office of Tax Simplification (“OTS”) has closed and HMRC/HM Treasury are directly tasked with the tax simplification agenda. Chartered Accountants Ireland made the point again that legislative complexity goes hand in hand with administrative complexity and that the Government should consider implementing a “confidential sandbox” approach to development of tax policy that examines proposed policy changes even before budget day. This is not a new recommendation and one made previously by the Institute in it response to the HM Treasury 2021 review of the OTS.
The theme of the conference was “Creating solutions together” and it was clear from the conference speeches and workshops that the vital and important role played by tax agents is also high on HMRC’s agenda as HMRC aims to tackle poor behaviour by “bad agents”, and also introduce improved digital services for agents with an overall aim of “strengthening the intermediaries ecosystem.”