HMRC’s latest update on the agent forum include the following:

“Agent Forum (AF)

As at the end of September 2020 the Forum had 1105 registered subscribers including Professional Bodies, 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. Even though registrations have not reached the levels of its former platform, participation and issues traffic are increasing. We are also stepping up our recruitment of internal HMRC users. Thus far during 20/21 we have dealt with 251 widespread issues, across all Heads of Duty. The new ‘Knowledge Base’ feature is also increasingly popular and carries announcements and real time taxes information. 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), Job Retention Scheme (JRS) and Eat Out to Help Out scheme. We will be having two new boards, one for UK transition and one for Self-Assessment. We have in conjunction with our Issues Overview Group (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. Performance metrics thus far for 20/21 include over 18000k forum views, over 20000 knowledge base views and 220 resolved topics since April 2020, which are all moderated daily with appropriate responses given, as determined by subject matter, related traffic generated, and referrals provided by line 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 2.5 FTE Moderators, who moderate and run the forum.”