Stakeholders Event – 1 Horse Guards Road – 6 March 2008

Workshop breakout exercise re: HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) response to the Capability Review

Attendees:

Pippa Goldie (RNIB)
Frances Corrie (TaxAid)
Robin Williamson (LITRG)
Nigel Purkis (One Parent Families)
Hashmukh Pankhania (CEMVO)

Group Facilitated by

Sheila Page (HMRC)

Captured ideas and feedback

Q1 – What should a programme of sustained engagement include and cover. What do you want from it?
  • There is a general fear and mistrust of HMRC so working in partnership with other organisations to approach HMRCs customers may make HMRC more approachable and improve that first contact.
  • Any engagement or contact between HMRC and their customers should take consideration of the life stages that people are going through as individuals.
  • More evident and supportive points of contact would improvement engagement. Specifically more sustained dialogue and an understanding that language needs and other individual differences may lead to more complex contact which needs to be catered for.
  • Processes, relying on a timetable of contact and strict rules on stages increase the risk of people ‘falling between the cracks’ something is needed to ensure that any customers or cases falling into this category are noticed and addressed in a timely way. It is felt that this may reduce the likelihood of cases faltering and therefore avoid stressful debt management situations occurring unnecessarily.
  • HMRC is still seen by many as an organisation that ‘just wants to take peoples money’.
  • Events and face-to-face contact creates effective engagement. Providing these at locations convenient to the customer and through intermediaries or in partnership with other organisations may make HMRC more approachable in these instances.
  • There are still problems for people who require information in different formats, these requests are not always listened to. A single person contact may deliver on this need very well continuously, however, this is not evident across the organisation so contact with someone unknown to the customer or their representative does not assure them that their needs will be listened and delivered to (example given of single contact at Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) however this is a one off rather than the norm, it needs to become the norm).
Q2 – What key things should we bear in mind as we develop and implement the new structure? Are there any quick wins we can implement?
  • Events like this are great but not always available or evident.
  • Customers ‘do not need to see how the organisations work underneath as long as it does work’.
  • Menacing first impression (more specifically in the compliance arena) often increased by tight deadlines which seem unreasonable when it is evident that HMRC can take a long time when responding to customers or turning work around.
  • Quick win – contact centres/telephone centres, staff should be trained enough to be able to answer simple queries at first contact rather than having to refer every query to another area of the business. ‘Money should be put into training to be able to find resolutions at that stage rather than just pass it on’.
  • Quick win – ‘processing gaps need a catcher’. – processes relying on stages increase areas where they can falter, Cases to be reviewed on an on-going basis – especially debt management.