My current beef is with the Trusts & Estates Dept. I registered a Trust in October 2022 using the online system and I received an acknowledgement. I received by post a letter stating that the Trust had been allocated a Trust Reference number ( Note not a UTR ). I had made HMRC aware that the Trust was receiving income & that a Return would be required. Having received no further coommunication from HMRC and concerned about the possibility of them seeking penalties further down the line, I completed a paper return which I submitted in April 2023 using the Reference number which they had allocated. Nothing back until 21 August when a letter arrived by post stating that as there was income into the Trust it needed a UTR. The UTR is only available by someone as Trustee undertaking a digital handshake through their own gateway - that did not work ! So instead of telling me the UTR in the letter I am now totally in limbo. HMRC tech people do not know how to resolve the problem save to say " Well it should work "!
It surely comes as no surprise whatsoever to anyone in the profession that the annual report / audit on HMRC has highlighted once again the huge disparity between what HMRC convinces itself is reality and the experiences which agents & the general public endure on a daily basis.
Telephone calls are being answered on average within 16 minutes - perhaps this is when they finally pick up a call when the caller has previously spent 59 minutes on hold on 3 separate occasions ! I have all too often this calendar year waited on hold for over 30 minutes on the agents dedicated line.
HMRC have now re-allocated resource from elsewhere to a dedicated team who will deal with post over 12 months old where no response has been sent. They clearly know this problem exists but they are unable to identify it unless an agent or a taxpayer writes in on a set format to alert them.
We all recognised that the Covid assistance schemes would quickly become a hotbed for fraud yet HMRC had no systems in place to either identify or counteract it.
And then it is revealed that off payroll working is only an issue it would seem for the likes of the NHS & the BBC. together with many other larger employers. HMRC has over 66,000 "employees / workers" but seems to ride rough shod over the their own rules.
HMRC has a crack the size of the San Andreas Fault running through it & until someone with basic commercial common sense takes control of this organisation, MTD should be postponed indefinitely.
HMRC deliberately refrained from announcing this to taxpayers so that they would be forced into seeking online / webchat advice. The position is of course that HMRC will, as they say, monitor the service between now & September against a non existent benchmark so it will not be surprising that in late September the usual statistical guff will be announced stating that " As HMRC expected, the use of online services & webchat provision increased by 400% over the same period last year. This therefore proves that the telephone support service( which was not available to use) is almost redundant and as such will be withdrawn fully in 2024" HMRC will then require 5 or 6 times the number of web chat operators than telephone support staff and they will offer a totally inferior laminated sheet service underpinning their complete lack of technical knowledge which results in an even worse service than exists at the moment. By way of example I used the online provision for a specific query when completing a CGT property disclosure & simply wasted 40 minutes of my life .
I am now old enough to remember the days when ,in my city, we had 4 tax offices manned by staff who were polite & helpful. An Inspector group with good tax knowledge resided at each office and it was usually possible to speak to an individual Inspector on the same day albeit on occasion they would perhaps call back the following day. Those offices of course closed and I suspect that the knowlegeable staff all accepted their terms & conditions and irrespective of their value to the service they were allowed to leave.We then moved to a regionalised service which for us in the midlands meant that we were speaking to people mainly in Norwich or Blackpool.As a money saving exercise vast areas of office space were released as HMRC became "Leaner & Fitter" but actually less fit for purpose. With increased technology and the holy grail of all taxes being made digital the service has been reduced to a point where anything more complex than basic payroll RTI or filing of SA Returns cannot be dealt with at a single point of contact. To cite a recent HMRC classic - our client wished to voluntarily register for VAT upon the basis that she was preparing for a contract which would exceed the reg'n limit within 6 months. She received a notification from HMRC stating that they did not believe that she met the criteria for voluntary registration so they had cancelled the application. She this week received a letter ( with no reference number !) advising her that she now had 1 point on the penalty system for not submitting a return on time. She spent an hour on one phone call before being cut off and then a further 40 minutes on a second call. HMRC said that she needed to pass security which included details from her VAT Reg'n certificate. When she explained that she had not been registered in the first place, HMRC said she had failed security & cut the call ! HMRC do NOT provide a service to the taxpayer ( Sorry their customers ) and this is simply the tip of a very large iceberg which through the likes of global warming and climate change is rapidly reducing and being dissipated to a very small ice cube. HMRC do not need to be headed up by honors seeking senior civil servants but by commercial realists without the arrogance that accountants seem to now be faced with on a daily basis
I totally agree that we are able to manage our A-E grades and it has made us a better firm for doing so - I guess the point here is that similar practices to ours don't recognise things in the same way. We use our processes as part of continuous imrovement. One point however is that we are director led but we have other staff who review work & see clients in addition to the Directors. It is important to us that the middle tier, senior staff have bought into the process & understand what we are looking to do.
Some years ago, pre Covid, our practice embraced the concept of Business Excellence which looked at our practice as a whole, extending from leadership & management through people & processes and ending up with results. The subject matter of this discussion point played a significant part in the way in which we carry out out business. We took a major step in looking outside of our sector to understand how others deal with issues and we looked at it from two angles. (i) The individual client & (ii) a sector of business types. It is not a specific science as some "gurus" might want us to believe but that tried & trusted quality of "common sense". At an individual client level we graded each of our clients from A to E based upon simple to evaluate criteria some measurable & some anecdotal. eg; How long they take to pay,Quality of their records, responsiveness to queries, WIP recovery rate, attitude to our staff, recommending potential clients. The intention was not necessarily to get rid of the Grade E Clients but to get them to improve towards maybe a C - they are unlikely to get to A! What surprised us most was the buy in of clients to the process with some asking how they can improve & why. The answer for us was priority. When time pressures may be on, do you work for the grade A client of the Grade E ? Grade A clients are hard to get so look after them or someone else will ! In terms of business sectors we did extricate ourselves from some areas which felt tough at the time but we are now far better for it.
Sadly SteLacca - it is the tip of a very large iceberg. There are now too many Revenue processes which are not fit for purpose. The farcical part in the main is that HMRC want to introduce online procedures but then revert themselves to writing letters in response. Typical example is that we now file Let Property Scheme disclosures online. We then wait weeks for a letter of acknowledgement & deal with that & payment by normal post. Then we receive a closure notice followed weeks later by a promise to look at it within 90 days and then a further letter asking for example " why did the rentals stop?" - Well I guess they could look at the SA Return showing a CGT computation on sale ! HMRC have literally no idea on integration of IT systems for any of their procedures.
Without considering the pro's & con's of the proposed changes, I find it somewhat strange that the Trade Body for builders is saying that many builders are not aware of these proposals. If the FMB has 8000 members then surely they must already know and perhaps the quoted numbers who "may not be aware" include many sub contractors who will be aware of it via the main contractor or paying agency . How many of the 2/3 are actually VAT registered? It is so easy for Trade Associations to blame HMRC but what exactly is the purpose of the FMB if not to keep members informed?
It never ceases to surprise me just how often letters come out from HMRC which when looked at carefully, seem to reflect the personal views & thoughts of the writer rather than reflecting the correct tax law & procedures. A case like this is, on the most simple cost benefit basis, complete madness. Frankfx makes a very valid point regarding cost and also who is the (in)competent person pursuing the case. Were HMRC seeking to consolidate their own thinking rather than the law on penalties and thereafter seeking use as a precedent? The protagonist within HMRC, you would think, would verify the actual legal standing before wasting time & money on things like this?
My answers
My current beef is with the Trusts & Estates Dept. I registered a Trust in October 2022 using the online system and I received an acknowledgement. I received by post a letter stating that the Trust had been allocated a Trust Reference number ( Note not a UTR ). I had made HMRC aware that the Trust was receiving income & that a Return would be required. Having received no further coommunication from HMRC and concerned about the possibility of them seeking penalties further down the line, I completed a paper return which I submitted in April 2023 using the Reference number which they had allocated. Nothing back until 21 August when a letter arrived by post stating that as there was income into the Trust it needed a UTR. The UTR is only available by someone as Trustee undertaking a digital handshake through their own gateway - that did not work ! So instead of telling me the UTR in the letter I am now totally in limbo. HMRC tech people do not know how to resolve the problem save to say " Well it should work "!
It surely comes as no surprise whatsoever to anyone in the profession that the annual report / audit on HMRC has highlighted once again the huge disparity between what HMRC convinces itself is reality and the experiences which agents & the general public endure on a daily basis.
Telephone calls are being answered on average within 16 minutes - perhaps this is when they finally pick up a call when the caller has previously spent 59 minutes on hold on 3 separate occasions ! I have all too often this calendar year waited on hold for over 30 minutes on the agents dedicated line.
HMRC have now re-allocated resource from elsewhere to a dedicated team who will deal with post over 12 months old where no response has been sent. They clearly know this problem exists but they are unable to identify it unless an agent or a taxpayer writes in on a set format to alert them.
We all recognised that the Covid assistance schemes would quickly become a hotbed for fraud yet HMRC had no systems in place to either identify or counteract it.
And then it is revealed that off payroll working is only an issue it would seem for the likes of the NHS & the BBC. together with many other larger employers. HMRC has over 66,000 "employees / workers" but seems to ride rough shod over the their own rules.
HMRC has a crack the size of the San Andreas Fault running through it & until someone with basic commercial common sense takes control of this organisation, MTD should be postponed indefinitely.
HMRC deliberately refrained from announcing this to taxpayers so that they would be forced into seeking online / webchat advice. The position is of course that HMRC will, as they say, monitor the service between now & September against a non existent benchmark so it will not be surprising that in late September the usual statistical guff will be announced stating that " As HMRC expected, the use of online services & webchat provision increased by 400% over the same period last year. This therefore proves that the telephone support service( which was not available to use) is almost redundant and as such will be withdrawn fully in 2024" HMRC will then require 5 or 6 times the number of web chat operators than telephone support staff and they will offer a totally inferior laminated sheet service underpinning their complete lack of technical knowledge which results in an even worse service than exists at the moment. By way of example I used the online provision for a specific query when completing a CGT property disclosure & simply wasted 40 minutes of my life .
I am now old enough to remember the days when ,in my city, we had 4 tax offices manned by staff who were polite & helpful. An Inspector group with good tax knowledge resided at each office and it was usually possible to speak to an individual Inspector on the same day albeit on occasion they would perhaps call back the following day. Those offices of course closed and I suspect that the knowlegeable staff all accepted their terms & conditions and irrespective of their value to the service they were allowed to leave.We then moved to a regionalised service which for us in the midlands meant that we were speaking to people mainly in Norwich or Blackpool.As a money saving exercise vast areas of office space were released as HMRC became "Leaner & Fitter" but actually less fit for purpose. With increased technology and the holy grail of all taxes being made digital the service has been reduced to a point where anything more complex than basic payroll RTI or filing of SA Returns cannot be dealt with at a single point of contact. To cite a recent HMRC classic - our client wished to voluntarily register for VAT upon the basis that she was preparing for a contract which would exceed the reg'n limit within 6 months. She received a notification from HMRC stating that they did not believe that she met the criteria for voluntary registration so they had cancelled the application. She this week received a letter ( with no reference number !) advising her that she now had 1 point on the penalty system for not submitting a return on time. She spent an hour on one phone call before being cut off and then a further 40 minutes on a second call. HMRC said that she needed to pass security which included details from her VAT Reg'n certificate. When she explained that she had not been registered in the first place, HMRC said she had failed security & cut the call ! HMRC do NOT provide a service to the taxpayer ( Sorry their customers ) and this is simply the tip of a very large iceberg which through the likes of global warming and climate change is rapidly reducing and being dissipated to a very small ice cube. HMRC do not need to be headed up by honors seeking senior civil servants but by commercial realists without the arrogance that accountants seem to now be faced with on a daily basis
I totally agree that we are able to manage our A-E grades and it has made us a better firm for doing so - I guess the point here is that similar practices to ours don't recognise things in the same way. We use our processes as part of continuous imrovement. One point however is that we are director led but we have other staff who review work & see clients in addition to the Directors. It is important to us that the middle tier, senior staff have bought into the process & understand what we are looking to do.
Some years ago, pre Covid, our practice embraced the concept of Business Excellence which looked at our practice as a whole, extending from leadership & management through people & processes and ending up with results. The subject matter of this discussion point played a significant part in the way in which we carry out out business. We took a major step in looking outside of our sector to understand how others deal with issues and we looked at it from two angles. (i) The individual client & (ii) a sector of business types. It is not a specific science as some "gurus" might want us to believe but that tried & trusted quality of "common sense". At an individual client level we graded each of our clients from A to E based upon simple to evaluate criteria some measurable & some anecdotal. eg; How long they take to pay,Quality of their records, responsiveness to queries, WIP recovery rate, attitude to our staff, recommending potential clients. The intention was not necessarily to get rid of the Grade E Clients but to get them to improve towards maybe a C - they are unlikely to get to A! What surprised us most was the buy in of clients to the process with some asking how they can improve & why. The answer for us was priority. When time pressures may be on, do you work for the grade A client of the Grade E ? Grade A clients are hard to get so look after them or someone else will ! In terms of business sectors we did extricate ourselves from some areas which felt tough at the time but we are now far better for it.
I don't believe 2015/16 (as stated in the article) is relevant?
Are not the 3 relevant tax return periods 2016/17,2017/18 & 2018/19 ?
Sadly SteLacca - it is the tip of a very large iceberg. There are now too many Revenue processes which are not fit for purpose. The farcical part in the main is that HMRC want to introduce online procedures but then revert themselves to writing letters in response. Typical example is that we now file Let Property Scheme disclosures online. We then wait weeks for a letter of acknowledgement & deal with that & payment by normal post. Then we receive a closure notice followed weeks later by a promise to look at it within 90 days and then a further letter asking for example " why did the rentals stop?" - Well I guess they could look at the SA Return showing a CGT computation on sale ! HMRC have literally no idea on integration of IT systems for any of their procedures.
Without considering the pro's & con's of the proposed changes, I find it somewhat strange that the Trade Body for builders is saying that many builders are not aware of these proposals. If the FMB has 8000 members then surely they must already know and perhaps the quoted numbers who "may not be aware" include many sub contractors who will be aware of it via the main contractor or paying agency . How many of the 2/3 are actually VAT registered? It is so easy for Trade Associations to blame HMRC but what exactly is the purpose of the FMB if not to keep members informed?
It never ceases to surprise me just how often letters come out from HMRC which when looked at carefully, seem to reflect the personal views & thoughts of the writer rather than reflecting the correct tax law & procedures. A case like this is, on the most simple cost benefit basis, complete madness. Frankfx makes a very valid point regarding cost and also who is the (in)competent person pursuing the case. Were HMRC seeking to consolidate their own thinking rather than the law on penalties and thereafter seeking use as a precedent? The protagonist within HMRC, you would think, would verify the actual legal standing before wasting time & money on things like this?