The £97million cost of calling HMRC

It has been revealed that taxpayers lost £97million calling HMRC last year alone

The National Audit Office has revealed that during 2015 and 2016 taxpayers forced to hang on to phone calls, whilst trying to speak to HM Revenue and Customs lost a total of £97 million. This is an increase from £63 million the year before.

The audit concluded that the customer service quality provided by HMRC to taxpayers completely collapsed amid major staff cuts. HMRC appears to have got their move to digital badly wrong as they tried to move everyone online and reduce the number of phone calls coming in – reducing the number of customer service staff too early.

Even though HMRC reduced the cost of a call to them by moving from higher rate calls to local ’03’ numbers, the saving on that was outweighed by the increase in time most customers had to spend in order to speak to an advisor.

Have you been subjected to a ridiculous wait to speak to customer services at HMRC? Let me know in the comments below or on our Facebook page.