On 16 February, HMRC held its annual stakeholder conference at the QEII Centre in London, bringing their senior leadership team together with around 200 representatives from professional and trade bodies, software developers and charities groups.
Jim Harra set the tone for the day in his introductory remarks, saying ‘while HMRC is responsible for running the UK’s tax and Customs Service, we’re acutely conscious that we’re only one actor: we’re stewards of a much wider ecosystem of people who play a part in making the UK’s tax and Customs regime work. That ecosystem is represented by all of us in the room today, which is why it’s essential that we all work together effectively and learn from one another’. He wanted working together to become HMRC’s ‘default way of doing business’.
On professional standards and intermediaries, Jim set out HMRC’s aspiration to ‘strengthen the intermediaries ecosystem ... by raising standards in the tax advice market and by improving our agent services’. Turning to service standards, he pulled no punches saying that ‘we want to improve our customer service levels, but in a world of limited and falling real-term budgets that is going to be challenging,’ adding ‘realistically to do this we need even more of our customers using digital services and self-serving online’. Angela MacDonald reinforced that message, saying that the pace and scope of the shift to digital will intensify and widen and that taxpayers will increasingly be guided into digital channels. There were some encouraging statistics: at 31 January, more than 97% of self-assessment returns had been submitted on time and more than 96% of them were filed online. HMRC’s mobile app has already clocked up nearly 40m logins in 2022/23.
Another theme that featured in the introductory remarks was simplification, ‘a crucial foundation stone for transforming tax’. Following the demise of the OTS, it was acknowledged as a core priority for HMRC. I particularly welcomed Jim’s acknowledgment that ‘just under six million people make up our small business customer group and our own research tells us that they don’t always feel supported’. Simplifying tax for them is (rightly in my view) regarded by HMRC as vital. Jim saw identifying the pain points and finding solutions as a joint project that he was keen to start working on together straight away.
After the introductory remarks, the day was devoted to exploring key themes through workshops and informal conversations. Workshops covered simplification; UK border issues; intermediaries; customer challenges and small business issues. Each workshop was co-chaired by a member of the HMRC senior leadership team and an external stakeholder. As co-chair of one of the workshops (on tax simplification), I can attest to the fact that there was a great deal of candid engagement.
Minimising the time devoted to formal presentations to maximise the time for discussion worked well. The acid test however – as Angela MacDonald acknowledged in her closing remarks – will be whether, at next year’s conference, we will be able to point to clear changes triggered by the discussions. That will depend on making a reality of Jim’s aspiration to learn from one another: the conversations on 16 February were an encouraging start.’
On 16 February, HMRC held its annual stakeholder conference at the QEII Centre in London, bringing their senior leadership team together with around 200 representatives from professional and trade bodies, software developers and charities groups.
Jim Harra set the tone for the day in his introductory remarks, saying ‘while HMRC is responsible for running the UK’s tax and Customs Service, we’re acutely conscious that we’re only one actor: we’re stewards of a much wider ecosystem of people who play a part in making the UK’s tax and Customs regime work. That ecosystem is represented by all of us in the room today, which is why it’s essential that we all work together effectively and learn from one another’. He wanted working together to become HMRC’s ‘default way of doing business’.
On professional standards and intermediaries, Jim set out HMRC’s aspiration to ‘strengthen the intermediaries ecosystem ... by raising standards in the tax advice market and by improving our agent services’. Turning to service standards, he pulled no punches saying that ‘we want to improve our customer service levels, but in a world of limited and falling real-term budgets that is going to be challenging,’ adding ‘realistically to do this we need even more of our customers using digital services and self-serving online’. Angela MacDonald reinforced that message, saying that the pace and scope of the shift to digital will intensify and widen and that taxpayers will increasingly be guided into digital channels. There were some encouraging statistics: at 31 January, more than 97% of self-assessment returns had been submitted on time and more than 96% of them were filed online. HMRC’s mobile app has already clocked up nearly 40m logins in 2022/23.
Another theme that featured in the introductory remarks was simplification, ‘a crucial foundation stone for transforming tax’. Following the demise of the OTS, it was acknowledged as a core priority for HMRC. I particularly welcomed Jim’s acknowledgment that ‘just under six million people make up our small business customer group and our own research tells us that they don’t always feel supported’. Simplifying tax for them is (rightly in my view) regarded by HMRC as vital. Jim saw identifying the pain points and finding solutions as a joint project that he was keen to start working on together straight away.
After the introductory remarks, the day was devoted to exploring key themes through workshops and informal conversations. Workshops covered simplification; UK border issues; intermediaries; customer challenges and small business issues. Each workshop was co-chaired by a member of the HMRC senior leadership team and an external stakeholder. As co-chair of one of the workshops (on tax simplification), I can attest to the fact that there was a great deal of candid engagement.
Minimising the time devoted to formal presentations to maximise the time for discussion worked well. The acid test however – as Angela MacDonald acknowledged in her closing remarks – will be whether, at next year’s conference, we will be able to point to clear changes triggered by the discussions. That will depend on making a reality of Jim’s aspiration to learn from one another: the conversations on 16 February were an encouraging start.’
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