The whole HMRC phone network went down for many hours, meaning businesses and taxpayers were unable to contact any of the helplines throughout Wednesday afternoon.

The precise reason for the shutdown was not clear, but at the time HMRC said it was down to a ‘serious technical issue’.

In a statement an HMRC spokesperson told Business & Accountancy Daily: ‘We’re sorry some customers were unable to call us for a short period on Wednesday afternoon. All our lines returned to normal on Thursday morning.’

Our team tried various numbers and found the same message on all lines tested so it appears this problem was widespread.

HMRC also indicated that ‘it worked at pace to fix’ the issue, and officials at the tax authority are now ‘looking into this issue to understand more about what happened, and learn lessons for the future to prevent it from reoccurring’.

The unavailability of all HMRC helplines came to light after numerous messages across social media highlighted the issue, and it was raised at a Treasury Committee hearing which was being held while the problem was ongoing.

This meant MPs could question HMRC deputy CEO Angela MacDonald directly about the outage.

MacDonald said the reason for the problem was a failure of the ‘telephony interface’ between the initial call and HMRC officers.

Callers to HMRC were met with a recorded message stating: ‘This phone line is temporarily unavailable due to technical difficulties but normal service will resume as soon as possible’.

They were then directed to online services to deal with their queries. The phone system went on again at 8am this morning although callers were being warned that there were minimum 20 minute wait times and were advised to go to the HMRC app to resolve any questions.

One of the major infrastructure projects currently in the pipeline at HMRC is a complete overhaul of the aged, legacy telephone system, with tenders going out to contact centre as a service (CCaaS) providers. This will be a multimillion project.

It understood that HMRC is moving towards a ‘single, modern technology platform’ for their customer contact channels which they hope will ‘continue to transform how we operate, provide a more seamless experience for our customers, and develop a more resilient and efficient service’.

Last summer, the government contract list showed that HMRC had put out an invitation to a number of suppliers to respond to an ‘early engagement’ sounding-out exercise about possible options for a new system for its contact centres. This included shared-business telephone network services, IP telephone services and electronic message and information services providers.

HMRC plans to replace contact centre phone system | 23 Aug 2024