My credit card company is now offering what they choose to call a concierge service. Apart from the fact that my pronunciation of the word has been terminally skewed by The Producers, the concept is a useful one. At the moment they are looking for Spanish football tickets for me since my Spanish is not up to buying direct and UK agents cheerfully charge you three times face value.
Then I thought, that’s what you want when you’re dealing with HMRC, a concierge. Interestingly and cheerfully, the French word comes ultimately from the Latin conservus, meaning a fellow slave. The credit card company derive it, I suppose, from the hotel concierge who will arrange things for you in a helpful and discreet sort of way.
Which perhaps is what I want when I contact HMRC. I know what I don’t want, which is an ill-trained and ill-paid call centre operative trying to guess an answer from a screen and probably telling me, when he realises that he cannot answer the question, that somebody will call me back within three days.
Now if you look in the latest document entitled ‘Delivering a new relationship with business’, you will see for the first time that HMRC is thinking this way too. They call it Customer Relationship Management (because they have been placed under an enchantment and cannot use plain English any more), but part of what they are planning will, I hope, give agents a single point of contact that means talking to a human being, and possibly a human being with some idea of what they are talking about.
There are other implications here. When I was an inspector it was difficult even for workers in the department to contact a specialist. It is possible now for agents to talk directly to specialists in the department, but at the moment this works very much on a who you know basis whereas it needs to be formalised and provide equal access for all who need it. Yes, that needs managing too, because there is no point in giving the access to small businesses themselves: you need to be able to talk the language before this will help you.
There are of course those who hanker for the old days, when you could ring your local tax district and be put through to someone who knew, with the group leaders in the office perhaps playing the role of concierge. But perhaps that picture is too rosy, when the reality was that this person might trawl round desperately to find an Inspector prepared actually to talk to someone where he had not scripted proceedings first. But what has happened since is the dumbing down of tax advice. If you are only prepared to pay your front line staff £14000 a year and give them three weeks training then customer service will suffer.
It does seem that many of these problems have been caused by the drive to economise by cutting costs. Although chancellors have spoken of spending to save by taking on people who can raise more than their weight in tax, they have rarely followed it through. Now rumour has it that HMRC will have to resort to unorthodox methods to handle the amount of work coming from the details of offshore bank accounts and the numbers of people suddenly wanting to confess their wicked ways.
I joined the Inland Revenue in 1971, when they took in a lot of people because they had to replace the bulge of those who had joined just after the war. Now my generation (those of them who didn’t defect in the 1980s) are retiring and they are having to rush more people in: but if you have no inspectors between about 30 and 50 that leaves a bit of a gap. All the more reason to have someone to lead you in the right direction.
