Over the past 20 months, staff at HMRC have prioritized areas relating to Coronavirus and to providing support to individuals and businesses during this difficult time. This has included moving staff to specialist teams dealing with such issues as The Job Retention Scheme, The Self-Employment Support Scheme, and increasing the number of staff in the Time to P[ay Team.
This has had an inevitable effect on other areas of the day-to-day activities of HMRC including a slowing down in dealing with post causing a large backlog.
HMRC will now be putting a concerted effort into dealing with the backlog of post and getting up to date ready for the start of the new tax year in April 2022.
What HMRC Say
HMRC have released the following statement: –
“As you know, over the course of the pandemic, we made choices about the work we prioritised in order to protect our essential services and the livelihoods of our customer groups who need it the most. We prioritised the COVID-19 support schemes, the UK’s smooth transition from the European Union and the essential services that keep the tax system running.
We are in a year of recovery and are making solid progress. In the first half of the year, we focused on stabilising our phone services and our tax credits/child benefit services – while we maintained our customs services well within targets and supported the smooth running of the COVID-19 support schemes until they closed in October.
Recently, we’ve been able to move more resources back into our core tax activities now that the COVID-19 schemes have ended, and we’re adding further capacity through temporary recruits (contingent labour).
We are now working through the stocks of post that built up over the past year. We are doing this while keeping our helpline service levels and processing stable,and making sure we are prepared for key events in the coming weeks, like the Self-Assessment peak and the introduction of EU full customs controls in January.
By April, we expect to be delivering normal (pre-pandemic) performance on our core service lines – in terms of the work we have on hand, our turnaround times and the running of our real-time channels.”
How we can help with your queries
If you have a query and issue you would like to discuss with HMRC there are often only two options for you if you are making the query yourself: –
- To phone HMRC and hang on the phone for possible a very long time. This could be valuable time wasted for you when you could be doing more interesting and profitable things involving the running of your business.
- To write to HMRC and to join the current backlog of mail at their offices to be dealt with when time becomes available to them.
Either option is never the best option for you because you want to be running your business and not worrying about when a query with HMRC will be dealt with. However, there is a third option.
Let us deal with your query
Our experienced, well-trained and competent team of professionals have years of experience in communicating with HMRC and we pride ourselves on getting the right and best results for you. We are empathetic to your needs, and we can easily communicate this to HMRC on your behalf. We also have a wealth of experience within our team which may answer your query without the long wait of bureaucracy.
If you would like to discuss your tax needs or tax planning please get in touch