Ignored Complaint to HMRC

50Twuncle

I am trying to get the correct tax code issued to me - I also am owed £200 in overpaid tax from last year
Since April 4th - HMRC have sent me 4 incorrect codes - I wrote back to them each time, informing them that I am no longer claiming ESA hence my tax code should be increased by £4901 (FROM 159L) they continue to ignore me - HMRC have no email address either !!

I tried to phone - line permanantly engaged

So I wrote to the complaints manager at Cardiff (letter posted on 25th May) - STILL no reply - so I asked my MP for help - what else should / could I have done ?

chrismac1

Complaints normally take about 12 weeks to get a response, so long as they are awake and not on strike. So keep going and don't give up!

50Twuncle

"Complaints normally take about 12 weeks to get a response, so long as they are awake and not on strike. So keep going and don't give up!"

According to Direct.Gov - Summarise what you think has gone wrong and what you think HMRC should do to put it right. They will look at your concerns and contact you as soon as possible - normally within 15 days.

So far - I have been waiting for 23 days, with no sign of any contact.....

Pennywise

21Twinkle wrote: »

"Complaints normally take about 12 weeks to get a response, so long as they are awake and not on strike. So keep going and don't give up!"

According to Direct.Gov - Summarise what you think has gone wrong and what you think HMRC should do to put it right. They will look at your concerns and contact you as soon as possible - normally within 15 days.

So far - I have been waiting for 23 days, with no sign of any contact.....

It the word "normally" that's their cop out. I'd say a month or so is more likely, with the potential for 2-3 months. They "should" pick out letters clearly headed "complaint" for quicker response but it really depends on who opened the letter and how obvious you've marked it as being a complaint. If you havn't headed it as such then 2-3 months is normal time for dealing with post as the person opening it won't read the letters so it will get assigned as general non urgent post.

50Twuncle

Well - my MP is involved - so fingers crossed......

chrismac1

Well I am an accountant and I know all about the DirectGov site and I have 2 complaints in progress - all marked up COMPLAINT in bold and colour as the header.

The first was on 11 April. I got a "form - holding - or in other words DOING sweet FA" reply on 3 May, promising me a letter on 26 May which perhaps they have sent out using a pigeon which has been shot en route.

The second was on 16 May, no reply yet.

This is par for the course. Personally I define a reply as something which mentions specific points raised in your complaint, maybe mentions my client by name witin the text for example, something which at least gives the impression someone has bothered to read further than the word "Complaint".

On this definition I stand by my original claim that 12 weeks for a response is, if anything, an ambitious target. I tell clients to expect 4 to 6 months for any sort of credible resolution. Note that in both my current complaint cases they are absolute no-brainers, if they got as far as a Tribunal the person hearing the case would just laugh HMRC out of the room. (Note that a senior HMRC person agreed with this view "off the record" but not being directly involved in either Complaint could not take action on her opinion.)

John_Pierpoint

21Twinkle wrote: »

Well - my MP is involved - so fingers crossed......

My experience is that the MP will get lip service, so that is one step better than just being ignored.
The MP will forward nice letters about the civil servants being on the case BUT...............
(This is about benefits and a department that was going through a rationalisation half a dozen years go - perhaps a dress rehearsal for HMRC's current restructuring).

It never was sorted out - against a background of threats about court action - I had to write a letter that said:
"As far as I an concerned there is one government department involved, when this department has sorted out my late mother's missing winter fuel payment THEN I will refund the overpayment of attendance allowance".

Never heard another word; unfortunately the attendance allowance was 280 and the winter fuel payment was 300 quid.

To the staff involved in the chaos :hello: I do realise that you are as much victims of the system as I am - perhaps the politicians are trying to do too much?

bluep

Some tax offices have 3 months worth of post backlog to work through so there are very long delays in getting responses on this sort of thing. Agents can access the agent account manager process online but there's little recourse for the general tax payer - it is possible to get through on the general call centre helpline but takes perseverance or calling when you think the lines are least likely to be busy and half the time they forward your issue on via email to another department.

Not sure your MP would be able to speed things up much either to be honest unless they are very focused on the issue. The sad thing is that its not the people who work for HMRC's fault - they are massively understaffed for all of this stuff.

dori2o

bluep wrote: »

Some tax offices have 3 months worth of post backlog to work through so there are very long delays in getting responses on this sort of thing. Agents can access the agent account manager process online but there's little recourse for the general tax payer - it is possible to get through on the general call centre helpline but takes perseverance or calling when you think the lines are least likely to be busy and half the time they forward your issue on via email to another department.

Not sure your MP would be able to speed things up much either to be honest unless they are very focused on the issue. The sad thing is that its not the people who work for HMRC's fault - they are massively understaffed for all of this stuff.

It's not so much the understaffing it's the lack of any common sense with the proceedures we are forced to follow.

I'd love to be able to take a call from someone, take all the details down, take a phone number to call the person back, deal with the query/complaint/etc IN FULL, call the person back to advise what has been done, send off the correspondence to confirm, BUT........ I can't because I am restricted in what I can do.

People like chrismac just seem to beleive we sit there twiddling our thumbs all day and scratching our !!!!!! when the reality is this is far from the truth.

You might ask why don't the staff do something about it. The truth is we have, but unfortunately HMRC, especially customer contact and processing is being run by people who in their majority, have no experience of tax whatsoever. Many have come from outside, mainly banking (theres a big clue as to why the whole system is f**ked).

There are those of us who regularly do more than we should despite the fact we can be reprimanded for it, such as last week. We can do assessments over the phone now but only for 1 year (although training is currently being delivered to allow the last 2 tax yaers to be dealt with over the phone) I had a person call wanting to do their assessment for last year but the previous 4 years hadn't been closed. I took the information over the phone and did the assessments anyway. If that call isn't selected for quality checks I get away with it. If it is, then I'll take whats coming. My actions however meant that I didn't need to send a referral, and the customer now only needs to wait approx 10 to 14 days for their money, not 4-6 weeks.

Hopefully the recently announced merger between customer contact and processing will result in more actions being able to be performed at the first point of contact instead of having to send countless referrals. It should also mean less waiting time on the phones as more officers from processing are put onto the phone.

AS for complaints, the current response time is supposed to be 28 days from date of contact to receiving a response.

bluep

Sorry, perhaps I should have explained what I meant in more detail - shifting processes to call centre staff (understaffed as in not enough people to deal with the volume of calls) then not giving them the automony, or in some cases, training/experience, to deal with enough of a range of issues without referring them to another team. Plus, when those referrals go off, not enough staff to deal with the volume coming through.

If properly staffed with inspectors and support teams as in back in the days of local offices, then these things could be dealt with a lot quicker and more pragmatically. When I contact inspectors that I know in particuar districts that can sort things out, I get where I need to be within a couple days. Going through the "general telephone line" route...it takes weeks and months...

chrismac1

dori2o, I believe I set the bar pretty low when I call HMRC. All I ask is that the person on the phone DOES something. This excludes:

1. Telling me I have called the wrong number.
2. Telling me I need to post in a P60 or other information already in the system.
3. Telling me "it can't be done".
4. Passing me on to Belinda Buckpasser of the Back of Beyond office, sorry I don't have her number. But the office is on 0845 ......

Some examples of where nothing was done:

1. I was asking for a post code to be added to an address in the database. No siree, way too hard, please write in with that request.
2. I was asking for information on capital allowances for a client. Nope, we'll post that off. I can see it on the screen, but I'll post it.
3. Someone claimed they had "taken personal responsbility" for a case of mine. This consisted of telling Belinda Buckpasser about it.

Yes the root cause of all of this is utter mismanagement from Gordon Brown down, if Osborne can sort this out it will be a miracle. But in my experience, when you call HMRC on an 0845 number for something you want actioned, it gets actioned less than 20% of the time. The other 80% the buck is passed.

This is not a purely personal view. The accountancy websites are full of this sort of thing, full of work-arounds (some of which actually work but I am not posting them here or they'd stop working, sorry folks!).