23 01 2017

UK Commits To Improving Tax Industry, Taxpayer Engagement

Financial Secretary to the Treasury Jane Ellison has said she aims to increase transparency surrounding HM Revenue and Customs's performance, saying its customer service "hasn't always been good enough."

"Both the Government and HMRC know that it hasn't always been good enough" when it comes to providing excellent customer service, she said. "But that makes us all the more determined to set our sights high and step up our efforts to deliver a service that is improving all the time."

Her comments came at the launch of The Better Budgets report, prepared by the Chartered Institute of Taxation (CIOT), the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), and the Institute for Government (IfG).

"I'm ambitious about increasing the transparency around HMRC's performance in the future," she said.

In recent weeks, HMRC's digitization plan, Making Tax Digital, have been criticized by politicians and tax professionals. Meanwhile, the National Audit Office recently released its report on the tax agency's failed contract with private sector contractor Concentrix, which was terminated early after some vulnerable claimants who were eligible for tax credits had them terminated and later reinstated.

She said that the Government would look to involve the tax industry more in decision- and policy-making, as proposed in the report, stating: "This is a team effort and we can improve our tax system enormously by drawing on the knowledge people have across the tax community from practitioners to parliamentarians, academics, businesses, and representative groups... and I should add to that list the Office for Tax Simplification too."