Last
February I wrote a post
in which I peevishly listed various experiences of organizations not
working very well. One item on the list concerned the problems of getting
through the HMRC (the British tax office) on the telephone. So I was interested
to see that this week the
National Audit Office (NAO) published a report on HMRC’s quality of
service. This identified a
“collapse” in customer service over 18 months in 2014-15 with call waiting
times tripling and some customers being kept on hold for up to an hour.
What lay
behind this were massive cuts in staffing levels, which in personal tax fell
from 26,000 to 15,000 between 2010-11 and 2014-15. This of course is just one
of the many consequences emerging across all parts of the public sector as ‘austerity
economics’ bites deep under the ideology that eliminating the government’s
budget deficit is the sole aim of policy (what Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz calls “deficit
fetishism”). But there is more to it than that: associated with the cuts
was the technocratic fantasy of paperless (on line) tax returns and automated
telephony.
We’ll break
here for another oldster rant: why does everything have to be done online, with
endless passwords and usernames in hundreds of different formats? How I long
for the days when you could just fill in a form and send a cheque in the post.
There are still a few places you can do this and I would single out from my own experiences the
insurance company NFU Mutual as particularly good not just for this but for
that fact that they have an ordinary phone number that goes to the local office
where I talk to a person I have met and who has been in post through all the
years I have dealt with them. And, on the one occasion I’ve had to make a
claim, they are excellent to deal with. Is it because they are a mutual
organization?
Back to the
HMRC and what is interesting is to note how this story illustrates some of the
recurring – and linked - themes of my book, namely those of unintended
consequences and of the ambiguity of efficiency. In terms of unintended consequences
the issue is how cost savings in one budget show up as new costs somewhere
else. This is especially obvious in relation to HMRC because an effective tax
gathering system is vital to meet the costs of government spending departments.
So to impinge on the first inevitably has consequences for the second.
The issue of
efficiency is linked in that what may be efficient for the HMRC maybe
inefficient for other departments but, beyond that, inefficient for the user –
in this case the taxpayer or, as they are now called, with tragic
inevitability, customers. And let’s just have another break here to remind
ourselves how crass, how nonsensical, it is to describe people paying taxes as ‘customers’.
The NAO Report is helpful in quantifying this by reference to the HMRC’s own
costings of people’s time (£17 per hour, apparently). On this basis, the time
spent waiting and talking, and the cost of the call, added up to £97M (of which
£66M was the cost of waiting to be answered) in 2015-16. So HMRC’s efficiency
savings become its “customers’” costs. According to the NAO and the HMRC things
are now getting better, though I must say that this is not my personal experience
and, anyway, we have been here before. A damning
2012 NAO Report on phone call waits was also met with promises of improved
performance and assurances that this was beginning to happen.
There’s a
bigger organizational story here. The HMRC is the result of a merger, in 2005,
between what were previously the Inland Revenue and the Customs and Excise
office. Culturally very different, many date the problems at HMRC from this
archetypical example of reform through reorganization. Subsequently, there have
been repeated high-profile scandals. Dave Hartnett, its boss until 2012 when he
joined global accountancy firm Deloitte as a consultant, was
accused of cutting lax ‘sweetheart deals’ with big corporates like Vodafone and
Goldman Sachs, and called “a liar” by the chair of the Public Accounts
Committee. His successor, Lin Homer – dubbed ‘Dame
Disaster’ by satirists – was criticised for failures
in relation to the HSBC tax scandal and also for claiming
the HMRC to have had its best year ever in 2015 despite – yet again – massive problems
with phone systems. She stood down in April 2016.
As for the
future, who knows? HMRC have taken on more staff, but the ongoing closure
of 137 local tax offices in favour of 13 regional centres does not bode
well, and the latest NAO Report says that HMRC’s capacity to sustain planned cost
reductions rest upon its Making Tax
Digital initiative, another techno-fantasy, which has already
been met with scepticism, if not outright derision, by tax accountants.
It’s
tempting to ascribe all this to the well-attested failures of neo-liberal
ideology in general and the effects of its application to the public sector in
particular. But it’s more complex, and worse, than that. Even the
most assiduous neo-liberal assumes, accepts and expects that the State will
act as a ‘nightwatchman’, undertaking the basic functions of tax collection,
law and policing. But cuts have “brought
the court system close to breaking point” and are causing a crisis in policing
and in the
prison system. It used to be the leitmotif of anti-state ideologues that
cuts could be achieved by getting rid of ‘five-a-say Czars’, ‘diversity
officers’ and, of course, that perennial favourite ‘faceless bureaucrats’. Now
it turns out that even the most basic functions of the state are up for grabs.
If proof of that were needed, look no further than current
plans to privatise the Land Registry, the body that administers that most
basic feature of any capitalist economy, property ownership.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.