Taxpayers facing the January 31 tax return deadline were reminded that while HM Revenue & Customs helplines are likely to be impaired by COVID-19-related absences, a webchat facility has been suspended for most online services.
“The threat of a penalty for late filing will concentrate most people’s minds,” George Bull, senior tax partner at RSM UK, said in a January 5 briefing note. “If the past is any guide to the future, around 6 million people will be filing their return in January," he wrote.
Given the likely level of disruption to public services caused by high levels of omicron cases, it would be unreasonable to expect HMRC to maintain business as usual during January, Bull said. “You should not therefore assume you will receive rapid telephone support from HMRC, particularly with so many civil servants working from home,” he added.
There is no guarantee that HMRC will postpone penalties for late filing, Bull suggested, adding that “if penalties are to be postponed this year, the best information currently available suggests that this will not happen until the last minute.”
Taxpayers who are unable to pay their liabilities in full by the January 31 deadline can set up their own time to pay arrangement online “if they have filed their 2020-2021 tax return, owe less than £30,000, are within 60 days of the payment deadline, [and] plan to pay their debt off within the next 12 months or less,” HMRC said in a December 29, 2021, release.
Webchat Service Suspended
HMRC has suspended its webchat facility for three months for most online services, starting January 4. It held more than 3 million webchats with taxpayers and benefit claimants during the year that ended in March 2021.
“HMRC are pausing most of their webchat for three months from today to review their services,” the Chartered Institute of Taxation tweeted on January 4.
The tax body quoted HMRC as saying that “webchat is effective when we use it to answer simple queries . . . [but] supporting customers with complex queries has proven to be inefficient.”
"We’ll use this pause to fully review our services to make sure we are helping our customers in the most effective way possible,” HMRC said in an “HMRC update” published by the Association of Taxation Technicians on December 23, 2021.
HMRC said webchat is most effective “when we use it to educate and coach customers in using our digital tools.” The agency sent a similar message to taxpayers via email during December.
“You’ll usually have the option to contact HMRC through an online form, webchat, by phone, or by post,” HMRC says on its main contact webpage.
Service Status Dashboard
A new dashboard to be launched in mid-January is intended to “give tax agents a high-level overview of [HMRC’s] service status.”
The Association of Taxation Technicians noted that while its members “may well be disappointed” about the withdrawal of webchat, the new dashboard may prove useful. “We and other bodies have been in discussions with HMRC about service standards over recent months and we have been pressing HMRC for more transparency over delays and backlogs. We welcome the promise of the new dashboard and hope that it will enable agents to have a better oversight of the processing times for a number of key services,” it said.
HMRC played a vital role in the government’s economic response to the coronavirus pandemic, Chief Executive Jim Harra noted in a foreword to a performance overview published on November 24, 2021, alongside the agency’s latest annual report. Steps taken to balance resources and prioritize COVID-19 support meant that waiting times on some helplines were “longer than we would have liked,” he said, while customer satisfaction with HMRC’s digital services “reached an all-time high” of 88.5 percent in August 2020.
“We introduced a range of new digital services and increased our provision of webchats as a flexible alternative to phone calls, holding 3.1 million webchats with customers during 2020-2021,” Harra added.