According to the Treasury a quarter of phone calls to the HMRC tax helpline are going unanswered.
Astonishingly, HMRC does not provide guidelines for how long callers should be left waiting until an adviser attends to them. This is despite the Revenue having a variety of measures to assess the efficiency of its telephone services, including the percentage of all attempts handled by its contact centres.
HMRC apparently significantly improved the volume of call attempts answered from 48% in 2010/11 to 74% in 2011/12.
The 0845 helpline number is automatically answered seconds after the call is made prompting the caller to be charged. Taxpayers then have a variety of options to painstakingly listen to and select, thus spending further valuable minutes on the line before they can hope to be put through to an adviser. The writer has recent experience of this frustrating and expensive process having had cause to contact the helpline, spending an average of 25 minutes on the line from start to finish on each occasion. Quite simply, this is totally unacceptable.
HMRC recognise the problem and aim to achieve 90% of call attempts by 2014/15. In the meantime, should you need to use the helpline make sure you have a good book by your side to while away the hours!
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