Most HMRC forms (in paper form and online) have at least a few 'usability bugs'. These are things that make people unsure of what to do or even cause them to do the wrong thing. Such bugs cause people to phone the helpline and cause errors. They probably lead to some people just putting of the whole horrible experience.
The type of user feedback that HMRC have sought in the past has usually be the wrong type. They need low volume, super-high-intensity usability testing with the problems being solved.
That would reduce overall cost of compliance, cut helpline use, and reduce late returns.
The economics of small scale usability testing have been studied (decades ago) and what I am suggesting is just the good practice that has been known about for ages.
Shifting taxes from one type to another typically gives advantages to some people and disadvantages to others. It also means that people have a tax rise to complain about even though there is a tax cut that should please them.
The solution in both cases (that I have never seen used) is to explain to the electorate how the total tax take is being regulated and how the impact on different people is being controlled. Ideally, do the tax shifts in small increments over time, and show that each shift has had no effect on the overall tax burden and has not had a catastrophic effect on any small group of tax payers.
Our taxes should be gradually switched towards taxing wasteful consumption and pollution, and away from taxing things we would like people to do more of, such as working, passing on wealth to family, buying insurance, and moving house (often downsizing or to find work elsewhere).
All income from working, whether from employment, self-employment, or partnership should be calculated and taxed in the same way. It also should make no difference how a business owner takes money from their business. Any means one chooses should result in exactly the same tax charges payable at the same times.
An intelligent person with some mathematical ability and the right motivation could devise the tax scheme in a few months. More work would be needed to devise the transition to simpler calculations and collection methods.
It's time to look for something more specific and directly beneficial than growth of the GDP or GDP / capita numbers. We know the various ways these can be deceptive and, now that our economy is mature, those problems matter a lot more.
It is more important to focus on health, longevity, contentment, sustainability, capabilities, fairness, truth seeking, and so on.
In the push for sustainability we could measure separately (1) how satisfying our lifestyles are, (2) how demanding our lifestyles are in terms of resource consumption (including human labour) and (3) how efficiently those demands are met by our current technologies.
We don't have many of those measures in place at the moment, but we do know that CO2 per capita in the UK has fallen hugely. I think energy use per capita has also improved but I haven't checked those figures specifically recently.
I'm getting near the end of doing the probate and tax work on my late mother's estate. What a nightmare. HMRC and the court service have made this much, much more difficult than it needs to be by badly designed forms, software glitches, and general over-engineering.
It really isn't as simple as that, but underestimating costs and overestimating benefits are typical. The probability of this happening rises with the size of the project.
The explanations probably include some innocent cognitive bias and a lot of not-so-innocent deliberate mis-estimation done to get permission to go ahead with projects. If end users wanted something badly - especially if they weren't paying - then I would expect end user estimates to be biased for similar reasons to system vendors and government departments.
This article has confused auditors (internal or external) with the PO's Investigations team that we saw in the dramatization and that SPMs described as doing an 'audit'. From their behaviour it looks like these were former police officers, not accountant/auditor types. This, unfortunately, has led to further confusion in the comments reacting to this article.
Good point, but there may have been other opportunities. For example, if you are selling printed stamps then there's a stock of stamps being received and sent out (presumably not just recorded on Horizon) and money coming in. If you look at benefit payments then there's an amount of benefits you know you should be paying out (again, not just recorded on Horizon) and cash going out. Without knowing more details it is difficult to know what would have been possible.
That's quite possible. Designing an overall reconciliation to uncover systematic differences between cash coming in and cash expected might not have been easy and a determined and skilled person or team might have been needed. Also, it might have been complicated by timing differences that meant it was never possible to agree anything exactly.
Having said that, considering larger time periods would have revealed more despite timing differences. I personally have had a great success by graphing daily differences on a cumulative basis. This can identify leakage and even give some sense of when it happens.
My answers
With the right tweaks they could cut the number of people with queries quite significantly. So many of their forms and guides are confusing.
Most HMRC forms (in paper form and online) have at least a few 'usability bugs'. These are things that make people unsure of what to do or even cause them to do the wrong thing. Such bugs cause people to phone the helpline and cause errors. They probably lead to some people just putting of the whole horrible experience.
The type of user feedback that HMRC have sought in the past has usually be the wrong type. They need low volume, super-high-intensity usability testing with the problems being solved.
That would reduce overall cost of compliance, cut helpline use, and reduce late returns.
The economics of small scale usability testing have been studied (decades ago) and what I am suggesting is just the good practice that has been known about for ages.
Shifting taxes from one type to another typically gives advantages to some people and disadvantages to others. It also means that people have a tax rise to complain about even though there is a tax cut that should please them.
The solution in both cases (that I have never seen used) is to explain to the electorate how the total tax take is being regulated and how the impact on different people is being controlled. Ideally, do the tax shifts in small increments over time, and show that each shift has had no effect on the overall tax burden and has not had a catastrophic effect on any small group of tax payers.
Our taxes should be gradually switched towards taxing wasteful consumption and pollution, and away from taxing things we would like people to do more of, such as working, passing on wealth to family, buying insurance, and moving house (often downsizing or to find work elsewhere).
All income from working, whether from employment, self-employment, or partnership should be calculated and taxed in the same way. It also should make no difference how a business owner takes money from their business. Any means one chooses should result in exactly the same tax charges payable at the same times.
An intelligent person with some mathematical ability and the right motivation could devise the tax scheme in a few months. More work would be needed to devise the transition to simpler calculations and collection methods.
It's time to look for something more specific and directly beneficial than growth of the GDP or GDP / capita numbers. We know the various ways these can be deceptive and, now that our economy is mature, those problems matter a lot more.
It is more important to focus on health, longevity, contentment, sustainability, capabilities, fairness, truth seeking, and so on.
In the push for sustainability we could measure separately (1) how satisfying our lifestyles are, (2) how demanding our lifestyles are in terms of resource consumption (including human labour) and (3) how efficiently those demands are met by our current technologies.
We don't have many of those measures in place at the moment, but we do know that CO2 per capita in the UK has fallen hugely. I think energy use per capita has also improved but I haven't checked those figures specifically recently.
I'm getting near the end of doing the probate and tax work on my late mother's estate. What a nightmare. HMRC and the court service have made this much, much more difficult than it needs to be by badly designed forms, software glitches, and general over-engineering.
It really isn't as simple as that, but underestimating costs and overestimating benefits are typical. The probability of this happening rises with the size of the project.
The explanations probably include some innocent cognitive bias and a lot of not-so-innocent deliberate mis-estimation done to get permission to go ahead with projects. If end users wanted something badly - especially if they weren't paying - then I would expect end user estimates to be biased for similar reasons to system vendors and government departments.
This article has confused auditors (internal or external) with the PO's Investigations team that we saw in the dramatization and that SPMs described as doing an 'audit'. From their behaviour it looks like these were former police officers, not accountant/auditor types. This, unfortunately, has led to further confusion in the comments reacting to this article.
Good point, but there may have been other opportunities. For example, if you are selling printed stamps then there's a stock of stamps being received and sent out (presumably not just recorded on Horizon) and money coming in. If you look at benefit payments then there's an amount of benefits you know you should be paying out (again, not just recorded on Horizon) and cash going out. Without knowing more details it is difficult to know what would have been possible.
That's quite possible. Designing an overall reconciliation to uncover systematic differences between cash coming in and cash expected might not have been easy and a determined and skilled person or team might have been needed. Also, it might have been complicated by timing differences that meant it was never possible to agree anything exactly.
Having said that, considering larger time periods would have revealed more despite timing differences. I personally have had a great success by graphing daily differences on a cumulative basis. This can identify leakage and even give some sense of when it happens.