Assessing Self Assessment. Response to the Public Consultation on Self Assessment
Background
1.
By any standard, the introduction of Self Assessment was a huge and complex
undertaking. It has certainly been the biggest change the Inland Revenue
has introduced since the implementation of PAYE over 50 years ago, and
ranks alongside some of the largest projects undertaken by the private
sector. It was also the most fundamental reform ever of the personal tax
system.
2.
Self Assessment directly affected around 9 million taxpayers, 85,000 tax
agents, 350,000 employers and 25,000 Revenue staff - and, indirectly,
many more people than that.
3.
For the Revenue in particular, it required:
- the
introduction of complex legislation in three Finance Acts;
- the
design and construction of one of the largest computer systems in the
world;
- careful
management of a budget of £800 million, a significant number of
important risks (not the least of which was uncertainty about how taxpayers
would react) and a co-ordinated programme of 42 separate sub-projects,
involving some 800 inter-dependencies;
-
a massive training programme (involving over 500,000 training days at
a cost of some £60 million) to help Inland Revenue staff in some
600 offices quickly get to grips with new processes and procedures,
new cycles of work and new ways of working, while keeping work up-to-date
in other important business areas;
-
a similar education programme to inform the public of their new rights
and responsibilities;
-
a large educational programme for agents and employers, involving some
16,000 seminars and workshops, attended by some 215,000 people;
-
consultation, testing, prototyping and trialling on a scale larger than
ever before;
-
a step-change in customer service, including a national forms Orderline
open 7 days a week, a taxpayer telephone Helpline manned every evening
and at weekends, and the upgrading of local office switchboards in order
to handle the expected increase in telephone calls;
-
a major publicity campaign involving national prime-time television
advertising, branding and other marketing techniques; and
-
large scale data inputting by staff in local offices, and the adoption
by them of 'process now/check later', a radically different approach
to the way that tax returns are handled and examined.
4.
And it required all that to be done within a fixed budget, with an implementation
date laid down by law and against the background of the need to maintain
the Department's day to day work of collecting some £120 billion
of revenue each year.
5. It also presented major challenges for taxpayers and their representatives.
It required:
- all
Self Assessment taxpayers to take legal responsibility for filing returns
in a new format, and paying tax by fixed dates - and some taxpayers
to bring their tax affairs up to date first in order to do that - or
face automatic sanctions;
-
employers to get to grips with new requirements about the information
they have to give their employees; and
-
tax agents not only to help their clients cope but also themselves to
adapt to new legislation, procedures and work patterns.
