The latest figures from HMRC on its performance show some improvement in revenue collected and cost savings over the previous year’s quarter, but response times at its call centres have deteriorated alongside a drop in customer satisfaction
Cash expected from compliance, which measures the amount of additional compliance revenue when HMRC identify past non-compliance, rose from £1.67bn in Q1 2017 to £1.94bn in Q1 2018. HMRC applied a discount rate to reflect the fact that some of the amounts they identify will not be collected, due to insolvency for example.
Future revenue benefit, which assesses the effects of HMRC work on future compliance behaviour, dropped to £1.42bn from £1.52bn but the sum total of compliance revenues rose from £4.9bn to £5.3bn.
Meanwhile, the value of HMRC activities which prevented revenue being lost, such as preventing a fraudulent repayment claim, was £1.75bn, up from £12.5bn.
Q1 2018 saw cost savings up by six points over the same period in 2017 while 17% of callers waited more than 10 minutes for HMRC to answer the phone compared to 14.2% last year, with the average speed of answer in minutes and seconds rising from 04.13 to 04.55.
The percentage of post cleared within 15 days of receipt rose for 63.5% to 73.4% and the amount cleared within 40 days rose from 96.6% to 97.1%.
Average turnaround in days for tax credits and child benefit UK claims was up slightly from 13 days to 14 days and international claims’ turnaround rose from 51 says to 56.
Overall customer satisfaction dropped marginally from 79.5% to 78.9% while the total numbers of people accessing individual tax accounts rose from 10.9 million to 16 million.
These figures come in the wake of calls from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) for HMRC to significantly improve both its efficiency and its customer service. In its February assessment of HMRC’s performance in 2016-17, the PAC found evidence that the department’s long-term plans to transform were 'not deliverable as planned due to unrealistic assumptions’ and expressed concern that, as far as customer satisfaction was concerned, ‘sustaining its improved performance will be difficult given the assumptions…that underpin its transformation programme’.
The HMRC quarterly performance update - April to June 2018 is available here
