NO - HMRC doesn't tell staff to lie to you about your agent's authorisation


 I saw some chat recently on the Any Answers section of AccountingWeb about the way different sections of HM Revenue and Customs responded to the Agent’s Authorisation form. One agent was upset because staff had refused to talk to them on the phone about their clients. The reason was that they didn’t have a 64-8 paper authorisation. They had an online authorisation in place, but HMRC said it only authorised them to file online . “Is it Ok that HMRC staff are told to lie?” one of them demanded.

You can see it here  https://www.accountingweb.co.uk/any-answers/is-it-ok-that-hmrc-staff-are-told-to-lie

I can get how frustrating it is. I can get how perverse it seems. But HMRC will not have told staff to lie.

As I said here, don’t think of HMRC as one unit – it’s more like a bunch of villages. And at the moment, the villagers keep moving from house to house as the work moves around. And when we were talking about emailhere, I made the point that each village has its own rules and a lot of these rules are put in place to protect the punters from fraud.

It’s sad to say that there are some agents around who will register clients for a tax when it’s not in their best interest, and some agents who will register people for a tax without them even knowing about it. And you can have situations – say with bereavement – where people want to talk to HMRC about something that has a massive personal effect on them – but it’s all part of a legal process and the law says very clearly who HMRC can communicate with.

When it comes down to agent’s authorisations the two certainties are that (a) someone working in a process unit will have much less discretion than the audit officer you spoke to last week and (b) the person you’re talking to will be at the tail end of a very long process. The decision as to whether an authorisation can be accepted AND WHAT IT CAN BE ACCEPTED FOR, will have been made by management, usually in consultation with a Policy Unit. Sometimes based on a legal interpretation, other times to manage a particular risk.

Sometimes the distinction between a paper form and an online authorisation will have been agreed at a time when everything online was regarded as new and risky and a second-best alternative to something with a wet signature.

On top of this, the move to automate every process and force punters to use digital by default has created a new level of confusion. At the theoretical level, the fact that you’re using an online process has changed the legal basis of the relationship. On a more practical level, HMRC staff can’t always get as much information out of the new software as they could looking at a (scanned) paper form. And up until the day I left HMRC, the bigger problem was that the legacy software we used to do our day-to-day work wasn’t interacting with the software of the future which was still having the bugs knocked out of it.

As HMRC’s “Building Our Future” programme got underway, shutting offices and moving work around the country, we got further and further away from the managers who had made those original decisions and knew the reasons behind them. As you took on a new work area, you were left with a ream of procedures and (if you were lucky) some practical training from an AO – who often knew WHAT was done, but not necessarily WHY it was done. And since you didn’t own the new process, you had no authority to change it.

So sometimes it had us scratching our heads. Last week, working on process A, we could accept agents’ authorisations. This week, working on process B, we couldn’t. But that’s what a bureaucracy is for – to have someone higher up the chain making a decision, so that a hundred people further down the chain don’t have to make a hundred different decisions and maybe get it wrong.

When it comes to the new software not working, that’s as big a frustration for HMRC staff as it is for punters (or their agents).

And with the head count cut, and HMRC dealing with more and more of your problems through call centres – the quicker they can deal with Charlie’s case, the quicker they can move on to your call.

 


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