HMRC publishes call centre stats

Its training they need as well as more staff.

to answer 90% of calls?  Even if the caller waits for 45 minutes apparently?

57% of calls aren't answered within two minutes?  That is an age.  Many businesses aim to answer after two rings, but HMRC don't seem to have any target at all on time to answer.

Of course, the first poster is correct.  If the staff were better trained and got things right, there would be less need for telephone calls.

I read that the changes to child benefit (withdrawal between £50k and £60k income) will result in up to 500,000 more people being added to self assessment.

I would imagine the new 1,000 recruits will be kept busy!

They spend years trying to take people out of self-assessment and now they are going to lump another half million back in because of the governments terrible plan of collecting child benefit through self-assessment.

I mean seriously, how much are these guys paid to come up with stuff like this??

The statistic that I would like to see is how much money HMRC make from leaving people on hold on an 0845 number?  Wonder what my "Customers" would say if charged them for telephoning me.  Suppose they have to pay for the 1000 extra staff from somewhere.

Couldn't agree more with the point made earlier, the majority of my phone calls are to sort out HMRC errors, I have begun to end my calls by saying "Thank you for allowing me to help you correct your records"!!!!!

And aside from completely disagreeing with the whole child benefit issue, why oh why introduce it along with the RTI changes, I know they go together but seriously the complete lack of HMRC training and resources means that we all know it will end in chaos with the poor old tax payer footing the bill to sort it out.

Oh well keeps me in a job.

Nice to see the news item.

But does anyone have a link to the actual statistics so we can see them in more detail please?

.

With a risk of sounding all private eye

1000 staff for call centers to explain in essence a crazy tax system and to deal with their mistakes (there is rarely a requirement to call otherwise)

100 staff for tax investigations

and presumably 1 member of staff (probably a contractor operating through their own limited company, as I have had several IT clients do with HMRC) devoted to making things better. 

The last time I telephoned HMR&C as a "customer" on behalf of my son it took 27 minutes to get through.

Do they record how many people give up telephoning?

According to the small print:

“% call attempts handled: This is the percentage of all call attempts that are either answered by an advisor or dealt with successfully by an automated message. We count a call as being dealt with successfully by an automated message if the customer terminates the call directly after listening to the particular message.”

So, if you hang up in disgust after waiting for some useful information or contact, which wasn’t in the recorded message; your call has been successfully handled.

And… more than a quarter of calls aren’t answered at all. 

 HMRC SHOULD HAVE A FREEPHONE NUMBER AVAILABLE TO ALL AGENTS - YES A FREE CALL - ESPECIALLY WHEN SORTING OUT THEIR ERRORS WHICH ARE AND WILL INCREASE WITH THE CHILD BENEFIT PROBLEMS.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE TAXPAYER'S CHARTER !!!!

Please don't shout.