I Have A Complaint!
Fed up of waiting for a reply? Not satisfied with the service you got? Will making a complaint solve your problem? It might do, IF your complaint is about something that can be fixed. But, the more punters complain, the more it takes people away from their day-to-day work.
It might be that complaints are over-rated. Punters who get their problems fixed by complaining are more likely to recommend it as a solution. But, from what I remember, for every complaint where there was a problem that could be solved, there was another where the only answer was that HRMC had done everything right. You may not like the way it was done, but if it was done within the rules, that was the end of it.
(Hand on heart, when I worked for Large Business, I don't recall any complaints. Maybe I was lucky, or maybe it was because each business had a Customer Relationship Manager they could ring up to talk things over with. Maybe that sounds unfair. Maybe the man in the street could do with having someone at HMRC who he could ring up to sort things out with. But then, that would mean having loads more Civil Servants. And that would never do would it. So, my memories of complaint procedures are all to do with processing and customer services.)
HMRC’s centralised complaint teams record and log complaints that come in and vet them to make sure they’re valid (HMRC’s website lists a number of situations you can’t complain about, but that doesn’t always mean people read the lists). The most obvious example is you can't complain about a decision, because there's already a review and appeal procedure set in law.
Sometimes the complaints staff have the knowledge to deal with complaints themselves.
But if it needs a technical response, it will usually go down the chain to the unit responsible for the work area.
A few years ago, I’d have written, “office responsible for the work area”, but with office closures and work being split and moved from office to office, “unit” is probably safest. Of course, that’s part of the problem. Who was dealing with the work area when the problem started? Are they still dealing with the work area now?
In the past, either a line manager Officer or an Officer dealing with technical issues would get the job of answering the complaint. If they didn’t have the experience themselves, they’d get an experienced Assistant Officer to look into it. You needed someone who understood the procedures well enough to see what had gone wrong, and if possible, put it right. At the same time you needed to choose someone discrete – if an error had been made by someone in the same office, the last thing you needed was someone who’d take pleasure in going into the kitchen and dropping that they’d “sorted out” someone else’s cock up.
A lot of mistakes were due to lack of communication. A process would be amended but the change wouldn’t be written down in a procedural manual. And even if the change was written down, sometimes you’d bring someone back to a process they’d last worked five years ago. Yes, they should have spent some time re-reading the standard procedures. But often the reason for moving an “old hand” back onto a process was because “they knew it like the back of their hand” and they were expected to help clear the backlog.
As HMRC’s systems moved more towards automation, you eliminated those humans not following procedures. But sometimes, even with the robots following the procedures, things didn't quite work out. And even when humans were still involved, processes began being split across offices. So the Officer didn't have an overall view of the system. They had to interrogate the online audit trail to find the point where things had gone wrong. It wasn’t always easy to see what had gone wrong. The audit trail would just stop and there was no way of knowing if the system or a person was the cause. All the officer could do was contact one of the teams responsible for the online process to figure out how to put it right.
And as I said in this blog about IT systems, that got more difficult as the IT developers got more precious about fiddling with their systems.
I can’t imagine what it’s like dealing with a complaint report today. Not just because automation has increased, but because even before Covid, HMRC was moving work backwards and forwards between offices. So, the team responsible for dealing with a work area today may not be the one that was dealing with it when the complaint arose. And with all the redundancies, trying to find an experienced AO who understands the system may be a challenge.
And then there are MP’s letters. An MP’s letter on behalf of a constituent is just a complaint with a rocket up its jacksie. A Senior Officer would pass it on to a Higher Officer, who might sometimes bypass the Officer and go direct to an experienced AO. Everyone would have an interest in seeing that the complaint was answered in double-quick time. And if it concluded that no-one was at fault, so much the better. As I said at the start, I remember plenty of complaints where HMRC had done everything right.
Are complaints unpopular in HMRC? Sometimes they were welcome. Usually when there was a system problem that everyone knew about, and kept on pointing out. If there was no budget or no time to sort the problem, it just got referred up and lost in the black hole. So, if enough complaints came along, that might nudge someone high up to do something about it.
But, the problem with complaints is that dealing with them took everyone away from their day-to-day job. So, complaints may be seen as a cure-all, but the more you get, the more everyone else’s work slows down. In the end, you'll start getting complaints about work that isn't being done because everyone's dealing with complaints.
