Senior officials from HMRC will be back in front of the Parliamentary Accounts Committee (PAC) on Monday giving evidence on the use of customer service lines across government.
HMRC is one of the top three government departments making most use of higher rate phone numbers, according to a report published in July by the National Audit Office (NAO). The HMRC director general for personal tax, Ruth Owen, will be joined by officials from the Cabinet Office and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to answer MPs' questions about charges for customer telephone lines.
The NAO report showed that DWP and HMRC have the busiest customer telephone lines measured by call minutes connected. While other departments are answering the phones to callers in under a minute, the average wait for a caller to HMRC to speak to an advisor about a self assessment query is nine minutes.
The costs of telephoning for advice have already been discussed by the PAC, when the committee's chair Margaret Hodge said: 'It is not acceptable that vulnerable people are facing some of the highest charges to call central government about important issues such as benefits and redundancy. Call charges are complicated and difficult for callers to understand.'
Figures from the NAO report indicated higher rate telephone numbers across central government cost callers what Hodge described as 'an eye-watering' £56m in 2012-13, with 084 calls accounting for 63% of calls during the year.
In 2012-13, HMRC received 68m calls. According to NAO's report, between April and June 2013 HMRC introduced 15 new, cheaper 03 numbers to run in parallel with higher rate numbers on its busiest lines, and they account for 20m of the overall total. Once these lines have been replaced, the proportion of lines which only have higher rate telephone numbers will reduce from 76% to 40%.
HMRC has stated it will have added alternative 03 numbers for all personal tax, debt management and banking telephone lines by September 2013. The department will phase out the use of higher rate numbers on these lines over 18 months as current stationery and signage is replaced with the new numbers.
NAO described the government's approach to replacing higher rate numbers as 'inconsistent'. In the PAC review of the NAO findings, Hodge called on the Cabinet office to 'step up and set guidance for departments so they can focus on minimising the costs of providing telephone lines for the taxpayer and user'.
The audit watchdog's calculations suggest changing all higher rate numbers to cheaper 03 numbers would save callers £29m a year, at an annual cost to government of £7m.
The PAC session can be viewed on Parliament television via this link from 3.15pm on 2 September: http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/Home.aspx
