HMRC 'unacceptable' as taxman ignores 44 million calls

HM Revenue and Customs may be red hot at chasing up tax arrears but when it comes to picking up the telephone they are slouches.

Around 44 million calls a year to the taxman went unanswered, the Whitehall spending watchdog disclosed today.

The National Audit Office (NAO) described the performance of HMRC's 31 customer "contact centres" during the course of 2008-09 as "unacceptable".

Despite employing the equivalent of 10,500 full-time staff at the centres at a cost of £233 million, HMRC still failed to pick up 43% of the 103 million calls it received during the year.

During the busiest periods - such as the tax credit renewals peak in July - just one in three calls (33%) was actually answered.

Callers who did get through had to wait an average two minutes for a reply - or almost four minutes if they were ringing at peak times.

That contrasted with best practice in the private sector where the target is for 90% of all calls to be picked up within 10 seconds.

Although the latest figures for the first half of 2009-10 have shown some improvement by HMRC, the NAO said that more than one in four calls - 27% - were still not getting a reply.

In the private sector, the benchmark is that no more than 10% of calls should go unanswered.

Edward Leigh, the chairman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee which oversees the work of the NAO, said HMRC's record was "simply not good enough".

"I'm glad that HMRC has recognised that this level of performance is unacceptable and there have been welcome indications of improvement in 2009/10. But I do expect to see rapid improvement," he said.

Shadow chief Treasury secretary Philip Hammond said some of the missed calls would have come from among the most vulnerable people in the country.

"This is more evidence of the chaos at HMRC," he said. "Every missed call to the Revenue represents someone who has been let down by Gordon Brown's bureaucracy."

An HMRC spokesman said that, while its performance had "significantly improved" in the first half of 2009-10, more needed to be done.

"That's why we've committed to answering 90% of our calls, the industry standard, at 30% less cost by March 2012," the spokesman said.