House of Commons - Public Accounts

Select Committee on Public Accounts Twentieth Report

3 Helping taxpayers get their tax rights

25. Errors in completing the Department's forms may result in a taxpayer paying too much or too little tax, or in the Department having to do further work to correct the errors. The Department estimates that 3.3 million taxpayers filing Income Tax Self Assessment returns understated their tax by a total of £2.8 billion in the 2001-02 tax year. It has not estimated the extent of overpayments of tax but will be identifying overpayments in its random enquiry programme from 2008. However, it will take some time to complete the enquiries and finalise results, so it will be several years before the Department can produce reliable estimates of the level of overpayment.[26]

26. The Department estimates that, of the £2.8 billion understatement of tax, around £330 million arose from unintentional mistakes by taxpayers rather than more deliberate errors. It plans to use this analysis to develop a strategy to reduce taxpayer error.It will seek to reduce unintentional errors by redesigning forms and improving all of its communications material. For example, online forms incorporate a number of automatic checks to prevent mistakes.[27]

27. Taxpayers often contact the Department with questions about their tax obligations or for advice on how to complete forms. The Department assesses the accuracy and completeness of information it provides by telephone and achieved a 95% rate of accuracy in 2006-07. Despite this, the National Audit Office mystery shopping exercise identified various topics on which staff provided incomplete or incorrect information.[28]

28. The Department gives contact centre staff up to ten weeks' initial training and a standard online operating guide to help them provide consistent and accurate information. It also carries out routine quality monitoring with staff to help them understand and correct errors that they make. It accepts that there are areas for improvement and it plans to re-run mystery shopping exercises to identify and address errors and inconsistency.[29]

29. The Department trains all telephone contact centre staff to answer most queries. It estimates that over 90% of questions can be handled by frontline staff. More complicated questions should be referred to more expert staff. In the National Audit Office's mystery shopping exercise, most callers who should have been transferred to specialists were not. The Department recognises that frontline contact centre staff must know when to refer questions to someone with greater technical knowledge and has recently reminded staff when this should happen.[30]

30. Taxpayers can also obtain face-to-face advice at the Department's 279 enquiry centres. The Department has not set a target for the accuracy and completeness of advice provided at these centres. Enquiry centre managers regularly observe staff interviews with taxpayers to assess the quality of advice given, provide feedback and coaching for staff, as well as to identify common themes that need to be addressed. The Department is looking at ways of introducing more systematic measurement of its performance.[31]



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