An increasing number of UK taxpayers are having to wait up to a year \u2013 or sometimes even longer \u2013 for complaints about HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) to be resolved.<\/p>\n
The news comes at a time when the tax authority is facing mounting criticism over continuous errors and slipping customer service standards \u2013 and shortly after its own customer service chief, Ruth Owen, resigned.<\/p>\n
Earlier this year, the Revenue came under fire after a so-called \u201ctechnology failure\u201d left hundreds of thousands of self-assessment taxpayers uncertain whether their payments had cleared. A large number of complaints surely followed.<\/p>\n
Following this, HMRC faced harsh criticism over its Making Tax Digital (MTD) project and associated pilot schemes \u2013 before MTD was hurriedly shelved ahead of the snap General Election.<\/p>\n
More recently, the Revenue has faced criticism over its \u2018inaccurate\u2019 Employment Status Service (ESS) tool for contractors \u2013 which was launched ahead of controversial and confusing IR35 reforms.<\/p>\n
And now, the latest research suggests that the Adjudicator\u2019s Office \u2013 the watchdog which rules on taxpayer complaints about HMRC \u2013 has a huge backlog of more than 1,028 cases.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
In total, the Adjudicator\u2019s Office settled just 970 cases in 2015\/16 \u2013 less than half of the number of cases it settled the year before.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An increasing number of UK taxpayers are having to wait up to a year \u2013 or sometimes even longer \u2013 for complaints about HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) to be resolved.<\/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\/1832"}],"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=1832"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1832\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1833,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1832\/revisions\/1833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}