Find my local tax office....?

melancholly

this is a really daft question but i'm utterly confused. i need to contact my local tax office about overpaid tax but the HMRC tax office locator keeps giving me odd answers. i've worked for two places (within greater london - only, not a national company) this year and when i put their PAYE references into the search engine, i get suggestions to contact Salford and Edinburgh. this seems odd.

have tried to get through on the phone number but just sat in never ending queues (on hold again now!).

should i just go with the address they've given me from my most recent employer (even if it seems completely implausible - and not at all local!)?

jimmo

The results you got from the HMRC site are almost certainly correct.
Going back to the 60s and 70s the PAYE work for Greater London was dispersed around the country to what were known as London Provincial (LP) Offices and those have been absorbed into the latest system but the LP names have disappeared.

melancholly

ok - that's great - thank you! i've only ever had to contact tax offices out of london where they were really local. (and still waiting on this phone call after 25 mins to speak to someone - the music is pretty grating now!).

Pennywise

jimmo wrote: »

The results you got from the HMRC site are almost certainly correct.
Going back to the 60s and 70s the PAYE work for Greater London was dispersed around the country to what were known as London Provincial (LP) Offices and those have been absorbed into the latest system but the LP names have disappeared.

Things have moved on further and now it's not just Greater London that are dealt with hundreds of miles away. It's all being centralised around a few centralised "hubs" so most people will find themselves writing to or phoning offices at the other end of the country. Re postal addresses, there's now further changes coming in where you post letters to PO boxes rather than actual office addresses and your letters will then be scanned and electronically transmitted to staff to deal with. It's all part of the centralisation plan to move away from local tax offices - all in the name of efficiency!

John_Pierpoint

I phoned the number of "my" tax office. Then, after several attempts and nasty "we are busy" clunk click cut you off treatments, I got through to someone charming, but unable to answer my question.
"How are you getting on with the tax return I sent in last September [.....I don't want to get tied up again in owing tax and being fined]"

The answer to this question actually turned out to be "This year you were entitled to a small refund and we have automatically sent it directly to your bank account months ago" [shame you never got a calculation notification and still have a statement with a question mark against the modest 2 figure sum].

But that answer took a further two days of waiting for "my" tax office to phone me back. "You cannot phone them, they have to phone you".

As part of the initial call:

"I hope you don't mind me asking , but you don't sound as though you work at "my" local tax office?"

It turned out that HMRC now have a sort of "Triage" system for telephone enquiries, where the poorly trained talk to the completely clueless (aka ordinary members of the public).

Here is the link, at least it is not (yet?) somewhere in India.

http://www.callcentre.co.uk/ccf-news-content/full/hmrc-expands-in-cumbria

Perhaps a better approach would be "Have you posted this query for free on the MSE web site before waiting on the 'phone?" That might remove for free one layer of the "Triage" system..

Good luck

John

PS As an accountant allowed to make direct calls, "Pennywise" enjoys a privileged position.

Pennywise

John_Pierpoint wrote: »

PS As an accountant allowed to make direct calls, "Pennywise" enjoys a privileged position.

Not that privileged I assure you! We just have an agent's "priority" phone line that by-passes the public queue and gets diverted to a "more experienced" call-centre operative. If it's anything technical or unusual etc then they still have to just take your details and get someone else to call back, which can still take many days, if at all.

I do have a few "direct" line numbers to specific tax inspectors for specific clients simply because they've given me their direct line number in the past, which is a real godsend and means we can have some real direct dialogue without having to go through the barriers of the contact centres!