HMRC’s accounts and charter report for 2023/24 show that it continues to underperform, with key targets missed and call waiting times increasing significantly.

HMRC has published a collection of reports and documents analysing its performance in 2023/24. These include its annual report and accounts, and a report documenting its performance against the charter. ICAEW’s Tax Faculty has picked out the facts and figures most likely to be of interest to taxpayers and agents dealing with HMRC on a day-to-day basis.

HMRC’s performance against targets

Alongside its annual report, HMRC has published performance statistics for 2023/24 and a commentary.

The key performance indicators are as follows:

	Jan to Mar 2024	Apr 2023 to Mar 2024	Apr 2022 to Mar 2023	Target
Customer Satisfaction	78%	79%	79%	80%
Customer correspondence cleared within 15 working days	79%	76%	73%	80%
Customer correspondence cleared within 40 working days	92%	89%	89%	None
Net easy score	+59	+59	+60	+70
Telephones: adviser attempts handled	63%	66%	71%	85%
Telephones: average speed of answer	26 minutes	23 minutes	16 minutes	None
Telephones: callers waiting for more than 10 minutes	74%	71%	63%	None
Compliance yield		£41.8bn	£34.0bn	£40.5bn

Of the five targets shown above the only one that was met for 2023/24 is compliance yield. HMRC no longer treats average speed of answer and callers waiting for more than 10 minutes as priority metrics. Both measures have deteriorated significantly with average waiting times reaching 26 minutes, and almost three-quarters of callers waiting more than 10 minutes.

Throughout the publications, including the National Audit Office section of the annual report, there is recognition of the difficulties experienced by many individual taxpayers, agents and small businesses when interacting with HMRC – in particular, when accessing helplines. The impact of the reduction to HMRC’s budgets is highlighted, as is the extent of increasing demand. An additional 2.1 million people were brought into income tax because of frozen income tax thresholds in 2023/24 and many have more complex affairs.

HMRC has made some progress in delivering new digital services. The HMRC app gained almost two million new users and was used by almost four million unique users. 69% of interactions with HMRC now take place online.

The level of HMRC debt at March 2024 was £44.6bn, with £7.1bn in time to pay arrangements and £37.5bn available for collection. Approximately 900,000 taxpayers have time to pay arrangements. Having declined since their peak during the pandemic these debt levels appear to be relatively stable, although they are at historically high levels.

HMRC’s performance against the charter

HMRC’s charter sets out the standards of service that taxpayers and agents should expect from HMRC.

The charter report includes the results of research commissioned by HMRC. There has been a fall in the percentage of agents, individuals and small businesses who positively rated their overall experience of interacting with HMRC. For example, 37% of agents give a positive rating in the 2023 survey, compared with 45% in 2022. The figures for mid-sized and large businesses were largely the same year-on-year.

It also includes the results of a survey undertaken by the Charter Stakeholder Group. The survey asked respondents to give a score out of 10 for HMRC’s performance against each of the charter standards, with one being the lowest and 10 the highest. 1,647 responses were received, mainly from agents.

The three standards which can be said to represent the ‘health’ of the tax system scored the lowest average scores:

being responsive: 2.4;
making things easy: 2.8; and
getting things right: 3.5.

Typical feedback indicated that, while straightforward issues are often dealt with well, more complex issues are difficult to resolve.

Higher scores were recorded for the remaining five charter standards, which can be said to address the context in which HMRC operates. These include recognising that someone can represent you (5.7) and keeping your data secure (6.8).

ICAEW response

Caroline Miskin, Senior Technical Manager ICAEW Tax Faculty says “Perhaps the most concerning statistic for HMRC is the decline in trust. The survey results reveal that HMRC is trusted by less than half of individuals and agents and by around two-thirds of businesses. None of the performance statistics will come as a surprise to ICAEW members as they reflect their day-to-day experiences.”

“HMRC simply cannot deliver against the core charter standards while its performance levels are so poor and this will continue to be reflected in survey results until it improves. Interestingly, just 3% of respondents believe that HMRC is held sufficiently accountable for its performance against the charter.”

“Given budgetary pressures, we expect HMRC to continue with its digital first strategy. Many more interactions between HMRC and taxpayers could be online, but that is not the case for agents. There is much for HMRC to do to improve digital services and to fill the gaps in those services, especially for agents”.

Further reading

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