An increasing number of UK taxpayers are having to wait up to a year – or sometimes even longer – for complaints about HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) to be resolved.
The news comes at a time when the tax authority is facing mounting criticism over continuous errors and slipping customer service standards – and shortly after its own customer service chief, Ruth Owen, resigned.
Earlier this year, the Revenue came under fire after a so-called “technology failure” left hundreds of thousands of self-assessment taxpayers uncertain whether their payments had cleared. A large number of complaints surely followed.
Following this, HMRC faced harsh criticism over its Making Tax Digital (MTD) project and associated pilot schemes – before MTD was hurriedly shelved ahead of the snap General Election.
More recently, the Revenue has faced criticism over its ‘inaccurate’ Employment Status Service (ESS) tool for contractors – which was launched ahead of controversial and confusing IR35 reforms.
And now, the latest research suggests that the Adjudicator’s Office – the watchdog which rules on taxpayer complaints about HMRC – has a huge backlog of more than 1,028 cases.
Data for the 2015/16 financial year suggests that more than half of cases were dealt with in six months, while the vast majority were settled within a year or less. However, as many as 66 cases took more than 12 months to reach a resolution.
In total, the Adjudicator’s Office settled just 970 cases in 2015/16 – less than half of the number of cases it settled the year before.
The Office has said that it is looking into improving its customer service standards, and data for the 2016/17 tax year is expected to be published later this summer.