Taxpayers spent a staggering four million hours on hold to HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) in 2015\/16 \u2013 and experts are putting the delays down to \u2018unnecessary job cuts\u2019.<\/p>\n
Job cuts at HMRC have been on the rise in recent years, according to the National Audit Office (NAO), which claims that the tax man has scrapped some 10,800 employees since 2010 \u2013 over half of whom were dismissed in the 2014\/15 tax year.<\/p>\n
Defending HMRC\u2019s cuts, Ruth Owen, director general for customer service claimed that at least 55 per cent of MPs left due to \u201cnatural wastage\u201d.<\/p>\n
Ms Owen added that many employees were kept within HMRC, but deployed to different areas \u2013 and that some 2,400 additional staff had been recruited to make up the shortage.<\/p>\n
The average caller typically waited up to 47 minutes on hold to HMRC, recent studies have revealed.<\/p>\n
The NAO also found that some 4.2 million callers hung up after waiting for an average of 16 minutes each.<\/p>\n
Further defending HMRC\u2019s operations, Ms Owen said: \u201cThe reason we lost some staff with skills was down to the footprint of our contact centres. Some were also on older contracts, which meant they did not work evenings and weekends, and those are the periods when increasingly our customers want to be able to contact us.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cA large number of people phone about tax credits and when the next payment is. At bank holidays we put on a message saying \u2018if you expect to be paid on a Monday the payment will actually arrive on the Friday\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cWe then consider this call as \u2018answered\u2019, as they received the information they phoned up for.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Taxpayers spent a staggering four million hours on hold to HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) in 2015\/16 \u2013 and experts are putting the delays down to \u2018unnecessary job cuts\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1360"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1360"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1361,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1360\/revisions\/1361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}