How often in recent times have you tried to telephone a company or organisation and been fobbed off with an automated message stating, ‘we’re facing high call volumes right now,’ or some variant?
And then the cherry on top, ‘why don’t you head online with your query.’
I’m left thinking: are they really that busy or are they testing my very British queue patience to see if I’ll buckle and go to the dreaded chatbot?
TV presenter James May summed it up recently with a post on social media website X: ‘Government organisations, hospitals, retail conglomerates, utilities companies, you now have one option. Just answer the b*****d telephone. We’ve had enough.
‘Press one to hear this option again. Why not chat to us online?’
Taxing: Nobody wants to have to speak to the taxman on the phone – but the option should always be there (stock image)
For me, phoning a company or organisation is the very, very last straw. As in, I’ve tried to solve a problem, cannot do so, and therefore need some help. It’s not like I want to be parked listening to Greensleeves and I enjoy having said problem.
This frustration has been thrust into the news cycle this week. The taxman controversially announced it was closing its self-assessment helpline from 8 April to the end of September.
Not only that but it would do so every year – and then only take ‘priority calls’ in the periods outside of these dates.
Rightly, there was uproar and just 24 hours elapsed before an embarrassing, screeching u-turn worthy of Mr May’s former show Top Gear was made. This came along with intervention from the Government.
People don’t call the taxman without reason or for fun. The vast majority want to pay the correct amount of tax, but there are also sorts of quirks in the system that can make it complex.
I can see how a chatbot could help for simple questions and result in *some* efficiencies – but people also want the option to speak to a human when it comes to complicated financial affairs.
Digital innovation will no doubt offer benefits to taxpayers but to simply close helplines and funnel everyone online is clearly too much, too fast.
How on earth could HMRC not see that?
As Dawn Register from accountancy firm BDO put it: ‘It’s hard to envisage a time when tax is so simple and HMRC’s online systems work so well that human helplines will no longer be needed.’
It’s hard to envisage a time when tax is so simple and HMRC’s online systems work so well that human helplines will no longer be needed.
Dawn Register – BDO
Our reporter Angharad Carrick has been at the forefront of holding HMRC to task in the past year, especially from an entrepreneurial point of view – and she revealed last June how it was to close its self-assessment phoneline until September.
She then spoke to an insider to unmask the problems at the taxman and was told a ‘culture of fear’ and too much micromanagement was leading to HMRC pressures.
She later revealed when the phoneline re-opened in September, call waiting times of more than an hour were common, showing just how a backlog had grown.
Some new business owners were left waiting months just to be VAT registered and after reporting on a litany of reader problems, she argued that HMRC delays must be fixed or we will lose entrepreneurs.
Indeed, Daniel Woolf of Enterprise Nation said: ‘Small businesses are already having to tackle a great deal of uncertainty – it’s having a detrimental impact on growth.
James May: The TV presenter recently tweeted about companies not picking up the telephone
‘This flip-flopping on changes to availability of tax support will not have helped.
‘It’s essential the UK’s tax authority has high levels of customer service to help small business owners handle their tax affairs.
‘Entrepreneurs are happy to fulfil their regulatory obligations and need a reliable all-year-round service that can answer their questions and deal with complex issues.’
More individuals are also being dragged into the tax net. For example, HMRC is cracking down on online resellers who use digital platforms to make extra cash.
Meanwhile, it is extending Making Tax Digital to 1m landlords and sole traders with experts warning it could cause big delays.
And finally, a rise in the taxpayer population and the complexity of tax affairs means HMRC is ‘struggling to cope’, according to a recent report by the Public Accounts Committee.
Mix all of the ingredients above and it hardly sings: let’s shut some of our helplines almost immediately.
The average wait time for HMRC’s helpline sat at 25 minutes in January, according to its monthly performance report.
Nobody would choose to spend hours waiting on a telephone helpline if they could easily find the answer they are seeking online.
Gary Ashford – Chartered Institute of Taxation
This was up from 22 minutes 46 seconds in December 2023 and 20 minutes 21 seconds in January 2023 – meanwhile, call volumes fell 12 per cent annually.
What’s more, the volume of calls not handled due to lack of resource totalled 841,945 in January, a 188 per cent increase in a month.
The number of webchats in the same period hit 171,379, a 90 per cent monthly increase and a 198 per cent annual jump.
Gary Ashford, president of the Chartered Institute of Taxation, says: ‘While most agents and taxpayers want to be able to interact online, the necessary functionality does not yet exist, and the online guidance is not helping taxpayers find the answers they are looking for.
‘Nobody would choose to spend hours waiting on a telephone helpline if they could easily find the answer they are seeking online.
‘What HMRC need to do is make their online services – guidance, digital assistant and, where needed, web chat with an HMRC adviser – attractive enough that people choose to use them rather than the telephone alternative.
‘Then they will be able to scale down their phone lines without risking harming compliance.’
This HMRC u-turn really has made our tax authority look silly.
As the Treasury Committee put it: ‘Planned changes to the operation of HMRC’s phonelines have been mismanaged from the beginning.’
Let me know if you’re finding it impossible to speak to a human in government organisations, hospitals, retail conglomerates and utilities companies, like Mr May says.
Maybe we can put some pressure on them to put the brakes on making us all go loopy with chatbots.
