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LITRG explains problems reaching HMRC’s helplines in the run up to last weekend’s Self Assessment deadline for online tax returns, suggesting that penalties could be challenged where help was lacking.

Another Bumper Year

HMRC have reported another record-breaking year for Self Assessment online filing after counting up the tax returns for 2008-09 which should have been completed yesterday.  Over 6.4million people have filed online this year – an increase of 12% on 2007-08.

It cannot have come as a surprise to HMRC that many people left filing their online Self Assessment return to the last weekend possible. But help for an inexperienced user was not as good as it should have been.

LITRG tried to assess over the weekend what level of support the inexperienced user would have received. It was not consistently good; indeed sometimes it was poor.

So What Wasn’t Good?

We decided to test the total time necessary to wait to speak to a human being able to help with a simple tax question connected to a return. On Saturday 30 January we made six calls to the Self Assessment Helpline. Three calls made at hourly intervals in the late morning/early afternoon delivered an average waiting time of 14 minutes per call - far too long, especially for someone calling from a mobile phone.

Ringing later in the day produced a worse result. On each of three occasions, over a spread of a couple of hours, an automated voice told us that they were very busy and we should ring back some other time and goodbye.

Jargon

The HMRC online filing package has got better in recent years, but for the inexperienced user it is full of jargon and moving around the screens with confidence is not at all easy. Some sections are baffling even for experienced users. Many commercial software packages do it so much better.

The need for quick and easy help by telephone is vital. But HMRC make that difficult by:

• Poor signposting of where to go to for help;
• Failing to distinguish adequately between what the two helplines offered are able to provide;
• At busy periods just cutting people off with a request to ring at some other time;
• Forcing customers to hold on for very long periods which costs mobile phone users a great deal of money.

Poor Signposting

If you are in the online filing part of the HMRC website and you stumble across a problem the natural place to go is the “Contact us” button which appears on every page. This takes you to “Online Services Helpdesks” which tells you, if you have a technical problem with the Self Assessment online service, to ring 0845 60 55 999. Upon calling this number, taxpayers are confronted with a series of options. Somewhat confusingly, none of these explicitly includes IT help (in fact callers should choose the ‘other help’ option for IT support). One of the options offers help with Self Assessment, however once pressed callers are asked to re-dial the Self Assessment Helpline.

If you got through to Online Services, the call centre staff would help you with IT problems (for example, if you lost data when you used the back button or could not print). But they could not help if you had a technical query such as where on the return to put some source of income, or if you did not understand some instruction. If your query was of the latter type you would be told to ring the Self Assessment Helpline on 0845 9000 444 and no transfer would be offered to you.

Last Minute

HMRC might argue that people should not leave it so late to file their returns. But that misses the point. There is a statutory deadline, and if people do what they are supposed to do on or before that deadline, they have complied with the law. HMRC should make it as easy as possible to assist those who comply with their tax obligations, and whether they do so well before or just before the deadline is neither here nor there.

This year there will have been more inexperienced filers than ever before as HMRC encouraged even more online filing by extensive advertising.

So despite the fact that it was the last minute, HMRC should still provide adequate support, especially as they offer no face-to-face help.

What Should be Done?

For this year, anyone who tried to file over the weekend but was frustrated by not being able to get through to the Online Helpdesk, or whose query remained unanswered even though they were able to make contact, should appeal against any penalty notice they receive on the grounds that they had a reasonable excuse for late filing. And we want HMRC to recognise genuine cases as having a reasonable excuse, and to remit the penalty.

For next year’s return, we want HMRC to produce a really good interface for the inexperienced user; it is not beyond them, as several commercial software producers have already achieved it on limited resources.

As for the Helplines, surely it is not beyond them to have a single help number, appropriately displayed, which then sends people to the right place dependent upon the nature of the query?
Finally, HMRC need enough people to cover this, entirely predictable, peak for queries.