HMRC services update

Corporation Tax and VAT

Earlier in December, we ran a trial reducing the hours on some of our telephony services. This meant we could dedicate the time to work post that has built up over the past year. To test the approach, we closed our Value Added Tax (VAT) (with the exception of the bereavement line), and Corporation Tax (CT) phone lines on 3,‌‌10‌‌ and 17‌‌ ‌‌December.

By dedicating colleagues to post queues, we have been able to focus on delays in processing CT repayments and VAT post which we acknowledge were areas of concern for customers and agents. We made solid progress and worked through 14,000 post items.

Over the coming weeks, we will analyse the data from this trial in more detail and commit to sharing an update in January detailing our findings and next steps. We will not undertake any new shuttering until the end of January at the earliest.

Webchat

We are pausing most of our webchat for three months from Tuesday‌‌ 4‌‌ January 2022. We’ll use this pause to fully review our services to make sure we are helping our customers in the most effective way possible.

Webchat is effective when we use it to answer simple queries, which supports customers to use our digital services.

Supporting customers with complex queries has proven to be inefficient – for example supporting PAYE, customers with coding queries takes 84% longer via webchat than it does over the phone. Other examples include payments in Child Benefit and Registrations in VAT both taking around 50% longer.

Webchat is most effective when we use it to educate and coach customers in using our digital tools, and we know that this is what we need to build on. We’ll use this pause to fully review our services to make sure we are helping our customers in the most effective way possible.

The following lines will remain open:

• Online Services Helpdesk;
• Self-Assessment;
• National Clearance Hub;
• Imports and Exports;
• Debt Management;
• Extra Support; and
• Support for pandemic related activity will continue.

Dashboard

We are developing a dashboard to give agents a high-level overview of our service status. We will launch this in mid-January, and we will give you more detail in the new year.”