...that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.

don't think they need to be trying to "push people online" to explain why the phone service is so bad. It's so bad because the budgets have been cut and cut to the point where there are nothing like enough staff to do the job, and only staff left working there are the ones willing to do so for peanuts... and we all know what they say about who you get if you pay peanuts.

Never excuse evil by mistaking it for incompetence.

The trouble is... even people being evil can be incompetent.

Once upon a time, a new way of doing things had to be demonstrably better, and people would beat the doors down to get it - think car vs horse, colour TV vs monochrome, CD vs vinyl etc.

Then came the era of the "Nudge Economist".

Now it's all about making something as cheap as possible and herding people off the older better version by hiding, removing, degrading it until the cattle give up. Think streaming, Windows, shrinkflation, call centres...

HMRC aren't alone - they're just catching up with the utility companies, banks and other private sector pioneers of enshittification.

Still waiting for an urgent reply to a call I made three Junes ago...

In the last five years, HMRC have got my tax wrong at least once and sometimes twice in a year; most recently, 'you paid too much tax so we owe you' _and_ 'you paid too little tax so we're adjusting your tax code'...

I am looking forward to see what they screw up this year.

> HMRC aren't alone - they're just catching up with the utility companies, banks and other private sector pioneers of enshittification.

True... but there's a critical difference: if my bank, phone company, streaming service etc do this I can at least try to find a better alternative. Or if I can't find one, I can (in some cases at least) decide to go without that service.

I can't do this with my tax returns.

I am very happy to use online services where available, so I registered for the HMRC "customer" forums. I have posted perhaps three or four questions and without fail, they were not answered correctly by HMRC "admins", even after repeatedly pointing out their wrong statements by providing links to their own internal manuals. Complete FAIL and I've now stopped to use them.

Not just the UK.

I too have been disconnected despite being stuck in a holding queue for Canada Revenue & Other Services & disconnected as we are to busy right now.

It got to the point that I've had to be up & circling in the out of hours queue for about 30 minutes at silly o'clock following the menu prompts "As no one is available right now, please during in service hours", until the lines open out East (2 or 3 hours ahead of MST) & I become available for the next representative, even for being early in the queue it still took over a hour.

we all know what they say about who you get if you pay peanuts

To be fair to HMRC, when I called them about an issue the agent I spoke to was very friendly & helpful.

OK, so it's anecdotal, but I've been told by an HMRC employee that if the phone waiting times get down to the 30 minutes level, they are taken off answering the phones in favour of clearing the backlogs of paper correspondence.

You are not incorrect.

My wife works for HMRC in an undisclosed location, manning the phone lines. (Hence the AC)

As it's heading towards the end of January, they're doing the opposite - pulling people off post to man the phone lines to try and get the volumes down.

HMRC are currently hiring people like you'd not believe. When she was hired, she was one of a tranche of ~180 employees, and looking at the job adverts, they're pulling in the same number on a fortnightly/monthly basis.

They're pushing 2 days WFH simply because the building (even though it's massive) doesn't have enough space to house all the new starters.

You do realise that you've just cost the job of an HMRC employee?!? They told each employee a different time limit, so they could track which one(s) of them leaked! The one that was told precisely 30 minutes is now in a meeting with their boss trying to explain!

"They told each employee a different time limit, so they could track which one(s) of them leaked! The one that was told precisely 30 minutes is now in a meeting with their boss trying to explain!"

So they only have 60 employees?

As someone who has had to deal with tax problems and not being able to do so on-line, talking to a real person was essential. I will have to do the same thing next year to finish off the transition to retirement. THAT is something that the 'AI system' simply could not get it's head around and asking for help on-line has never taken me to a page that could actually help!

At a recent IOTA (Intra-European Organisation of Tax Authorities) conference a rep from an EU state gave a presentation on how COVID improved service levels, as people who'd never thought to try the online offerings were forced to. So many found them to be quicker and easier than traditional communication methods and consequently stuck with them that staff are able to support those who are digitally excluded or have complex affairs more effectively.

One key problem in the UK is that every change to HMRC's systems has to save money - and with the shift to digital they took the savings of staff cuts etc before bedding in the new systems so there's no-one around to help with the transition. And of course changes to improve taxpayer experience don't directly save HMRC money, so don't get signed off, either as initial design features or in remedial work. Add in the idiocy of rates and bands which change every year (or even more frequently) confusing taxpayers and their advisers and meaning expensive updates to software across the board... (A deeper issue is that the last government's austerity policies drove an entire generation of the most senior staff to take early retirement, destroying the insitutional memory of how to provide halfway decent service; that'll be even harder to fix than service levels)

The problem with the "save money" mantra, is that it often then adds inefficiencies, as you generally kill head count, then either rehire cheap or think tech can do the job and then find out it is orders of magnitude more expensive than actual humans with knowledge and skill.

Calling from overseas with mounting non-trivial call charges is no joke. Especially when they are trained to only provide stock answers. So no help at all. The other option is Facebook but it seems what you write down they only cursory look at or many are suddenly dyslexic or multi-tasking too much. You then ask again as the answer shows they have not read your question properly. Each cycle is a wait of a few days. Pathetic!

Any Government Service that uses social media like this should be shut down NOW. Posting on these sites is not private and Zuck will sell your data to other. Getting ads for Tax Advisers? Now you know why.

Stop the madness. Besides, Milennials and Gen-X using Facebook? No way, that's for oldies.

why should it be...

Off the top of my head . . .

Logging on is a pain in the arse.

You can get disconnected or make a mistake any time.

You don't get to see the questions up front, so you can easily enter something that has unforeseen consequences later.

You cannot see what you have submitted without logging on again (it might not be accessible afterwards anyway).

It is all about controlling access to your own vital personal data.

Paper (evidence) is better (for us!) in every way.

I spent many years in HMRC Longbenton working on the IT side and being in the perfect place to watch HMRC at work or lack of it and let me tell you the biggest waste of time, was staff pushing paper from one inbox to another, loo brakes bordering on light years and stopping for long endless chats of non-work related matter. Yes we all talk at work to colleagues, but HMRC staff take it to another level and if they get told off about wasting too much time, go crying to the union rep. I know of the hours in my role, wasted waiting on HMRC staff to get out of the way so my work can be done but they move and work at the same speed of an ice age.

When I read HMRC Longbenton I thought “HMP Longbenton”.

It’s just like one of those made up names that prisons seem to get.

My other half recently retired after being made redundant, so we shuffled monies around to be more tax efficient. All within the rules, but it made things hard for the poor loves at HMRC to understand. They would demand a paperwork trail for things they were informed by the pension companies, and we had no option to send them recorded delivery (at £7 a time) otherwise they would mysteriously be marked as "not received". Letters written were either ignored or only half read, giving us the impression that people were just doing enough to get it off their desk and flag it as "waiting for taxpayer". Eventually we managed to get them to register her for Self Assessment, and I was able to complete a tax return, with all the necessary additional information, done and dusted within an hour. Far less stressful, and much quicker than hanging on the phone or writing endless letters.

Even better is that you get a confirmation that all is complete within a couple of days, and they even send a written statement to that effect. How quaint.

So while I would agree that they need to sort out secure electronic messaging, they also need to have competent humans to read and act on those messages. They way things are looking, that won't happen any time soon, but we'll be emailing chatbots instead.

My conclusion is that the system they already have does in fact work, but only if you complete a Self Assessment. Just don't ask them for any help.

… but then they don’t know either. I’m convinced chariots got dreamed up purely to mask crap web site design (and I’m talking ability to find information, not how pretty it looks). Having said that the Gov digital service does seem to have got its ducks aligned as the sites are easy to navigate. But I take the point made earlier that you can get ambushed for evidence part way through.

for politicians to cover up their untaxed income are left on hold for 70 minutes....

Might it be that the reason HMRC is overloaded with help requests, both via phone and on-line, is that their tax rules are overly-complex?

You can start blaming Gordon Brown (and others) for that. He was famous or infamous depending on you POV... for adding hundreds of pages to the Tax book with every budget.

The whole thing needs scrapping and starting again with a system for the 21st Century not the 19th.