Check out the latest items on the Agent Forum. Remember, in order to view each item, you must be signed up and logged in. Readers are reminded that the forum is the first port of call for any issues being experienced as the forum has access to contacts across all taxes and teams within HMRC and raising it on the forum will also encourage others to report and identify trends.
All agents, who are a member of a professional body, are invited to join HMRC’s Agent Forum. This dedicated Agent Forum is hosted in a private area within the HMRC’s Online Taxpayer Forum. You can interact with other agents and HMRC experts to discuss topical issues and processes.
HMRC’s latest update on the agent forum is also available.
“Agent Forum (AF)
As at the end of September 2021 the Forum had 1811 registered subscribers with 83 joining in September, including Professional Bodies, which exceeds the amount of 1229 users signed up to its predecessor forum. We are separately inviting various customer groups with Capital Gains payment liabilities or Trust registration responsibilities to HMRC; the Law Society and Society for Trust and Estate Practitioners (STEPS) amongst them. Registrations have exceeded the levels of its former platform and will continue to grow as new Agents are invited to register as part of their email Agent journey. Participation and issues traffic are also increasing. We are also stepping up our recruitment of internal HMRC users. In 21/22 we have received 531 widespread issues so far, dealing with and closing 483 across all Heads of Duty. We continue to support agents and their clients through the COVID-19 crisis and have a live dedicated panel to deal with related issues and publish guidance for all associated schemes including the Self-Employed Income Support Scheme (SEISS) and Job Retention Scheme (JRS). We have set-up two new boards, one for Agent Forum user information which will make the guidance easy to access and one for the Issues Overview Group (IOG) escalated issues. We have in conjunction with our IOG stakeholder colleagues, put in place procedures to identify high priority widespread issues to be taken forward for resolution with our internal technical specialist and communications partners. This is being monitored by the Agent Forum team and others. We continue building our internal HMRC Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) capability, formalising recruitment from across HMRC to improve the quality and timeliness of issue resolution responses and to focus on Agent Forum operations. All posts are moderated daily with appropriate responses given, as determined by subject matter, related traffic generated, and referrals provided by lines of business. We have reviewed our performance metrics to more effectively manage our live ‘aged cases’ portfolio, given we better understand new functionality provided by the MS Dynamics platform.
The Digital Customer Support Services (DCSS) Agent Team is staffed by a Service Manager and 3.5 FTE Moderators.”
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