Sorry what did I misunderstand here? They cut the number of phone lines in order to push people online, as a way of helping fix the problem with people waiting too long? Wouldn't a first step have been to start to train more staff?

More likely it's in order to get the caller to just accept the assessment and pay up regardless.

Staff are more expensive than chatbots, and Ministers signed off on HMRC budgets based on baking in the cost savings from firing staff and replacing them with computers without factoring in the advisablility of keeping anyone on board to help taxpayers & their advisers with the transition.

[Digital can work - one European authority found that the silver lining of COVID was that having been forced to use the digital offerings so many taxpayers preferred them that they stayed online & revenue authority staff could focus on the genuinely 'digitally excluded' improving outcomes for everyone. Unfortunately HMRC's digital tools aren't actually good enough to support that sort of shift so UK residents are buggered (to use a technical term) in the short to medium term.]

Posting AC as tax policy work is my day job and i need to preserve plausible deniabliity with everyone at HMRC, not just the handful who would smile/grimace at comments like this, steeple their fingers, and drop a suitably gnomic platitude before diplomatically moving on having logged the point as signifcant in the long term.

HMRC is rapidly approaching the point where it costs more to run than the nation raises in taxes. This house proposes that HMRC be eliminated in a massive DOGE win. Those in favour say aye!

How would you define "rapidly approaching"?

I'll be charitable and assume you were trying to make a joke but forgot the icon; on any rational analysis, abolishing HMRC would be a truly DOGE level act of economic self harm.

HMRC costs single figure billions to run and administers the collection of the thick end of a trillion pounds a year of revenues. Granted, a lot of that rides on the back of the staggeringly efficient (from a government perspective) model of having PAYE and VAT, the two serious heavy lifters of UK tax revenues, mostly handled by private business/other departments eg NHS. But eliminating HMRC would make about as much sense as eliminating the IRS.

(see eg https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/feb/10/uk-tax-administration-costs-spiral-due-to-complex-system-says-spending-watchdog , about the most hostile analysis out there; highlights the actual cost of running HMRC, £4.3bn, and acknowledges that taxes administered are growing at a similar rate to costs but doesn't give the actual figure. To £843.4bn of receipts in 2023/24, or around 200:1. Even if you factor in £15.4bn of costs for UK business (https://www.rossmartin.co.uk/sme-tax-news/8268-gbp15-4-billion-annual-cost-of-business-tax-compliance) the UK tax system still represents much better value for money than any conventional commercial concern; around 4,200% profit margin. Typically multinationals run in the 10-20% range; domestic businesses like supermarkets might run far lower.)

Will any bidder actually say sorry it cannot be done or all will just say fully compliant (tell HMRC what they want to hear) and also underbid (to get the foot in the door). Knowing that when years later it all goes south no one will be any the wiser as the root cause will be far too complex and in any case it will be easy to blame HMRC itself which should have known better. We all know what is going to happen and the usual suspects will just gleefully play it along

Horizon MkII here we come...

A new trough opens..

S'nowt to see here.

A s’nowt in the money trough that is.

Crazy to think it would cost more than a billion pounds for them to employ enough people to pick up the phones in a timely fashion, so this is their only possible option...

Come to think of it, would it really cost more than a billion pounds for them to build up an in-house team with the skills to do this implementation without having to give half the cash to some executive's bonus scheme? I could absolutely put a team together to do it for a fraction of the cost, but then I understand software and hardly anybody with my skills is going to be working for the government because until recently they simply couldn't afford it because they weren't willing to pay extra for expertise.

According to my accountant, as soon as anyone at the Revenue gets to be halfway decent, they leave and go into private practice.

Fujitsu said to be tendering a Horizon bid - HMRC spokesperson excited at the prospect of prosecuting all those new tax dodgers.

Who let Fujitsu back in? has a relative or friend in Fujitsu?

Perhaps that might have been because people didn't _want_ to use digital channels?

Anything to do with the tax office beyond the very simplest query is a descent into madness. Even what may be a simple query (e.g. why is my tax all screwed up for the fifth year in succession?) which may have a very simple answer from a practitioner knowledgeable in the art, is emphatically _not_ simple for the person on the street who needs an answer. If it were, they wouldn't be asking... and a robot script doesn't cut it.

People, on the whole, need to talk to people, not machines. And if the tax office needs more people to answer the phones, it should hire them. It might even be able to get their income tax right.

Perhaps (and maybe this is a bit radical) they could spend a chunk of that money recreating the tax system so that it is not millions of pages with so many holes that those who have money to employ expensive lawyers and accounts actually pay a fair share of the tax take.

The problem is that it has just evolved and every change is simply patched on top of the existing mess.

A bit like Windows in some ways.........

That's ~£66 million a year.

How many people could be employed to answer the 'phones and give proper advice to punters.

Plus no consultants to make the new CRM system work (or not, see Birmingham).

Depending on the overheads - assume around 50% - and the average salary - is thirty grand a year enough to get sufficiently skilled people? Probably not... then you're looking at around a thousand people.

Oh, and this is government, so you'd need to budget for two thousand middle managers, too.

It would be much cheaper for HMRC to simply give the customers a tax return for a professional accountant's service.

Because £1 billion divided by 44000 customers waiting on the phone equals to 22727 pounds per customer.

Even spread to 15 years that would be 1515 pounds a year per customer!!! Quite a lot for more than one person's free tax advice.

But how will a new CRM help people waiting 70 minutes on hold?

Wouldn't most of the call be talking though whatever issue the person has? Or is the current CRM so slow that 50% of the time is spent looking at the spinning beach ball?

Of the opportunity to get £1B of income and the neverending consulting from whatever clusterflock they create not if, but when, they win which they undoubtedly will!