How Do You Make Tax Feel Less Taxing?
I've just been listening to a Civil Service World podcast called "It's Personal," and in particular a segment called "How do you make tax feel less taxing?"
It's an interview with Claire Walsh and John Swift from HMRC's Customer Experience Directorate who talk about their attempts to improve customer service. Your heart may sink when they start talking about mapping customer journey's to improve services and bringing colleagues on the transformation journey but you know what they're describing. Even though we wouldn't use the same language, they're basically following a sound strategy.
What did disappoint me was that there was the lack of detail. For instance, we were told that they won some kind of award for improving the bereavement process. But they didn't tell us how they improved the bereavement process.
I recall from seven years ago that HMRC's bereavement was fundamentally flawed, starting with the DWP offering a "Tell Us Once" process to relatives, where that vital information didn't get through to all the bits of HMRC that needed it. If they fixed that, then their award was well-deserved. But frustratingly we only got half the story.
We were told that when they "mapped out" all the bereavement processes throughout HMRC, they ended up covering an eight foot wall with post-it notes. When they investigated the reasons for all those bereavement steps within HMRC, sometimes no-one knew the reason why they were doing it.
Again, no real surprise there. Unless you had something like a Boards File retained by some Luddite, there was very little documentation of processes. Sometimes a step was put in place on Policy advice, sometimes in reaction to some perverse Tribunal decision, often because some line manager was trying to deal with an overstuffed suitcase of a process and hit upon a fix that seemed to work. As office closures and mass redundancies set-in, work areas were handed over like a game of 'pass the parcel' with diminishing understanding at each stage.
To un-thread all that, to separate with laser-like accuracy the legally required from the inessential and produce a bereavement process that worked and didn't leave relatives with a nasty surprise three months down the line would be a remarkable achievement, and I'd like to hear more.
(Amendment: just to make this clear, they always were lovely with the bereaved. But having received notification of a death, there were other bits of HMRC that needed to know and act on that information. Passing that information on was where the system used to fall down. The result was that our automated size ten boots would keep writing to the deceased, and eventually a human being would have to phone up (the bereaved) who would understandably say, "we used Tell Us Once." And at that point we would have to start a process that should have started months before.
And that was just one section of HMRC that I happened to be working in. I don't know how many times that was replicated in other regimes.
If digitalisation has eliminated issues like that, it's a success story they should be telling us more about.).
In the mean time, why not give Claire and John a listen? If nothing else, you'll learn what the talking pizza in the TV ads is all about.
