Taxman says sorry for not answering the phone

The taxman has announced a £45million investment in customer service after admitting that his call-handling performance is “well short” of what it should be.

The investment will pay for around 3,000 extra staff to join customer service teams, and will allow 2,000 staff in other “business areas” to move onto tax credits, letters and forms.

Lin Homer, chief executive of HM Revenue & Customs, said the recruitment and staff reorganisation – which is temporary – has been made on top of investments in IT.

She said these three steps “support customer service in the run-up to the 31st July tax credits deadline.” She also apologised to the scores of customers who have not been supported so far.

In particular, almost 2.4million calls that taxpayers made to HMRC in September 2014 went unanswered, meaning that only 66% of all calls to the department that month were picked up.

“Service standards were inconsistent across the year,” the Revenue admitted. “Some months [our figures show them] falling well short of HMRC’s 80 per cent target.”

Ms Homer reflected: “We set ourselves the target to answer 80 per cent of calls, to provide a more consistent level of service across the year and to reduce peaks and troughs in service levels between busy and quieter times.

“While we were successful in tackling the busiest peaks for Self Assessment and tax credits customers, we didn’t meet our call handling target overall.”

In fact, HMRC only answered 73% of calls that taxpayers made to it between January 2014 and March 2015 – a month where one in three calls to its officials were not picked up.

“We have gripped this issue,” Ms Homer claimed. “We have also invested in new telephone equipment, which lets us switch calls to many more offices, not just take them in contact centres, so more of our staff can help customers at the busiest times.”