Tax office

davemorton

Pathetic bunch of lazy sponges!!!
Try answering your phone while I am paying your wages with my taxes. Over an hour on hold to get to speak to a human, and still waiting. Quick enough to charge me if I take my time. And they say we have a well run country with an infrastructure like this, PATHETIC!!!!!!!!:mad:

*Although once they finally answered, the bloke was nice, polite and helpful. Credit where its due*

RadoJo

In fairness, it is their busiest time of year and with the best will in the world I'm sure they are probably suffering from the fact that the kind of queries they are taking are probably quite long winded and can't be dealt with in minutes. Glad that the person you spoke to was helpful though - there's nothing worse than being on hold and then not even getting the information you need!

Tiddlywinks

Get used to the wait - when the axe falls on the public sector then there will be fewer people to deal with the same amount of work.

Lokolo

It's the bloody 8th April.

2 days into the new tax year. Of course it's busy!

Jeez, soon you'll complain that shops are busy around Christmas!

donquine

davemorton wrote: »

Pathetic bunch of lazy sponges!!!
Try answering your phone while I am paying your wages with my taxes. Over an hour on hold to get to speak to a human, and still waiting. Quick enough to charge me if I take my time. And they say we have a well run country with an infrastructure like this, PATHETIC!!!!!!!!:mad:

*Although once they finally answered, the bloke was nice, polite and helpful. Credit where its due*

As you found, HMRC staff are generally very helpful.

They can't be blamed if there simply aren't enough of them.

vyle

I used to work at HMRC about 3 years ago. At that time, their ambition was to shed every part time member of staff, and get my office of about 100 staff down to abour 30, and then redistribute them to other offices, but they were going to close all the local ones, too.

You may get snooty about claiming they're lazy and that you're paying their wages, but they're not paid as much as you think, and there are far fewer than there used to be. It's not laziness that's the issue, but that there aren't enough of them, and those who do still remain are put under so much pressure it's unreal.

It really is a horrible, horrible place to work, and if you had ever worked there, you'd NEVER tar all civil servants with the same brush again.

pmduk

You'd probably be the first to complain if they had staff sitting around just waiting to deal with your call. What makes you so special you can't wait your turn at their busiest time of the year?

[Deleted User]

I understand your frustration, having been through a similar situation myself. But it's not just the tax office - I work in a school and getting hold of people in the local edu department can be nigh on impossible. You have to choose your time of day carefully, and even then it can take some time....

But as you say, the people on the other end of the phone are generally very helpful, and considering they must be working under considerable stress then they deserve a lot of praise for this!

davemorton

Appologies if it sounded like I was having a rant at the staff, I wasnt. It was at the people who cut these services to the bone. I never thought it wolud be a bust time, I though they wouldbe at the end of the year when all the tax returns had to be in.

pmduk

Pathetic bunch of lazy sponges!!!
Try answering your phone while I am paying your wages with my taxes

Appologies if it sounded like I was having a rant at the staff

Can you really be surprised that we thought you were having a go at the staff themselves?

vyle

davemorton wrote: »

Appologies if it sounded like I was having a rant at the staff, I wasnt. It was at the people who cut these services to the bone. I never thought it wolud be a bust time, I though they wouldbe at the end of the year when all the tax returns had to be in.

The end of January is when tax returns come in, and we were usually still logging them in until around the middle of march time - there were 10 of us getting around 500 a day coming in, more during the real peak rush, and then receiving piles of returns from the offices who had fewer staff and were too overworked to process them.

Then came dealing with the late returns and sending out late fine letters and filing amendments.

Then the new tax year began and we were processing everyone's new tax codes and the myriad problems that came with it. I think there was a quiet period once, but following the cuts I experienced, any quiet period became a time where I was given another job to do because whoever used to be doing it was no longer needed.

The thing that many people forget with HMRC staff is that they see what's going on and tend to hate it more than the public. The people in charge of the civil service are largely the ones on another planet.

There was controversy when we were sent a news letter from one of the big wigs urging us to "delight our customers" like high quality department stores.

The director in question honestly couldn't understand why we found that ridiculous and failed to see how we would never succeed in delighting people when we were providing a 'service' of taking money that our 'customers' would much rather keep.

And then there's the notorious "inactive banana" incident.