Corporate report

Part 1: our customer service and policy work

Published 31 January 2019

How our customer service and policy work complies with section 149 of the Equality Act

The Customer Equalities Team in HMRC continues to work with a wide range of internal and external stakeholders, helping the department to comply with equality legislation, provide the best possible service for people in protected equality groups, and drive forward improvements in customer service.

We continue to run a twice-yearly Disabled Customers Consultation Group and hold a Mental Health Forum. These involve a number of external stakeholder groups who help us to identify and address issues faced by disabled customers accessing HMRC services and by vulnerable customers with mental health conditions.

Most of our customers use our services without any problems, but we recognise that mistakes do happen and we continually examine our processes to identify how we can improve. We do this by listening to our customers and acting on their feedback, improving our complaints handling service and making the complaints process easy and accessible.

For example, in 2017 to 2018 we expanded the availability of our online iForm complaints service to all businesses and individuals.

We monitor customer complaints involving the protected characteristics covered by the Equality Act and use the analysis and information to improve customer service. Last year, we identified a trend of complaints involving customers with mental health conditions.

We developed new guidance to help colleagues to identify and support customers with a range of mental health conditions, incorporating best practice from external stakeholders. We promoted the guidance among colleagues in face-to-face events and also internally on our intranet site.

We have continued to work in partnership with the Royal Association for the Deaf to offer British Sign Language (BSL) translation services, which enable HMRC to hold live conversations with deaf customers who use BSL, and increased the number of subtitled BSL videos for HMRC’s YouTube channel.

HMRC has a strategic approach to raising awareness of customer equality policy among policy makers and our customer-facing colleagues.

We have:

• promoted the reasonable adjustments that our customer-facing people should offer to customers who need extra support
• developed guidance for supporting vulnerable customers and customers with mental health conditions and promoted these at a number of training events, led by senior managers
• delivered training sessions covering legislative requirements and equality impact assessments for our policy colleagues and will be doing more in 2018 to 2019
• developed a new page and guidance to support colleagues dealing with vulnerable customers, including those with mental health conditions
• promoted HMRC’s Charter, which sets out what customers can expect from us and what we expect from customers

Our equality objectives for 2016 to 2020 reflect our immediate and longer term priorities around customer understanding, digital services and customer service.

HMRC’s diversity and inclusion strategy 2016 to 2020, is built around 4 themes: representation, inclusion, capability and customers. It guides the work we do to help maximise the performance of all our people, and, in doing so, enables us to respond more effectively to the needs of our diverse customer base.

How HMRC helps customers who need extra support

We have continued to drive forward our ambitious programme to improve customer service for our diverse customer base and transform the entire customer experience of HMRC. This includes rolling out our digital services, where we want the customer experience to be consistently excellent. We continue to offer a telephone service and face-to-face support for those customers who need it.

Our Needs Enhanced Support (NES) service has continued to provide support and guidance to those who need extra help, including vulnerable customers. Our service helps people in various ways, according to their needs, such as home visits carried out by our advisers for customers that have issues with mobility or disability.

There may be one or a number of reasons why we offer NES for customers with a range of difficulties including:

• accessibility issues
• low personal confidence
• mental health or emotional difficulties
• special educational needs
• genuine problems with their ability to interact with our tax and benefits system
• circumstances where they’re unable to interact with HMRC’s set processes or actions in the required manner or timeframe, for example, because they are in prison

We offer a range of enhanced support, including:

• specialist help from our phone or webchat service where advisers can fast track an application or process where appropriate
• advisers who investigate a case and will call customers back over more complex queries
• face-to-face help at a convenient time and location or customer’s home
• debt management support
• holding 3-way conversations with the customer helped by people working for the Royal Association for Deaf people (RAD) using Skype for those with hearing impairments
• large print and Braille correspondence for customers with visual impairments
• a tailored accessible service suitable for various needs on the Additional Needs page on GOV.UK

We are continuing to upskill our advisers and expand their capability so that we can resolve more complex queries in a ‘once and done’ way and ensure customers get their tax and payments affairs right first time.

We are also expanding the service to help customers with a broader range of queries.

In 2017 to 2018, we successfully brought National Insurance contributions (NICs) queries within the NES remit and are now conducting a trial helping customers with VAT issues. In certain circumstances, we are now also able to make same-day repayments. Further opportunities for expansion are being explored.

HMRC also liaises with others to give customers the most appropriate NES service including:

• voluntary sector community partners, such as Tax Aid, Tax Help for Older People, Low Income Tax Reform Group, MIND, Citizens Advice Bureau
• the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) in supporting the transition to Universal Credit and sharing information and guidance to support a more joined up experience for customers
• local authorities with a key worker for the government-funded Troubled Families programme in England, helping families with multiple problems, including crime, unemployment, mental health issues and domestic abuse
• people working as coaches in HM Prison Service

In 2017 to 2018, our NES service:

• supported more than 110,000 customers
• received more than 97,000 calls from customers about taxes, tax credits, Child Benefit and NICs transferred from general helplines and the voluntary and community sector
• resolved queries from more than 21,000 customer letters
• supported more than 19,000 customers face-to-face in community venues or in their homes

Grant funding and engagement with the voluntary and community sectors

Voluntary and community sector organisations supported more than 48,000 customers through the HMRC Grant Funding programme, during 2017 to 2018.

This programme provides funding to organisations so they can support our customers who need extra help understanding and complying with their obligations and claiming their entitlements, including those who do not use our digital services. We have also agreed funding for 2018 to 2019 and 2019 to 2020.

The organisations have worked with us on the development and design of Making Tax Digital and promoting the introduction of the Personal Tax Account. They also help customers to form or rebuild a relationship with the department, which enables them to engage directly with us in the future.

Examples of support for vulnerable customers by the Needs Enhanced Support service

Emotional support for vulnerable customer with outstanding tax returns

A customer suffering from severe mental health issues following a breakdown got in touch and required help completing outstanding tax returns. She explained that she had a history of self-harming and the stress of her tax affairs was making her consider this again.

The NES adviser promised to take the customer through the returns step-by-step and assured her that no action would be taken against her while they were going through the process to complete the forms.

The adviser called the customer on several occasions, dealing with each tax return page by page. A face-to-face appointment was offered, but the customer didn’t want to leave her home and wasn’t comfortable with inviting people into her home.

The final call lasted almost 90 minutes and was stressful for the customer and the adviser, because the customer said she was hearing voices in her head and was threatening to harm herself.

The adviser continued with the call and gave detailed help with the tax matters as well as emotional support. Due to increased concerns for the customer’s welfare, the adviser suggested calling the emergency services. However, this agitated the customer further and so the adviser did not involve them and decided the best way to manage the situation was to complete the tax returns as soon as possible.

As a result, the customer completed the tax return fully and HMRC was able to call her back a few days later to advise she was due a tax refund. The customer’s mood lifted and she thanked the adviser for the support that meant her tax issues were resolved completely.

Assistance with tax and tax credits after sudden death in the family

A customer contacted us, distraught at the sudden death of his wife. She had always dealt with all their paperwork. He explained that his wife had also been legal guardian of their grandson because his son and daughter-in-law were heroin addicts, and he was dealing with the court to transfer the guardianship to him.

He did not know where to start with his tax affairs.

The adviser calmed the customer, reassuring him that she would give him all the support he required to bring his affairs up-to-date. The adviser organised a face-to-face appointment with the customer and gave him a list of documents to provide so the adviser could assist him to complete the outstanding tax return.

A few weeks later the customer contacted NES again, as he’d had an injury at work and almost lost his arm. His income had dropped dramatically and he was extremely upset and concerned that he would lose his grandson due to this. The adviser helped the customer to apply successfully for the tax credits he was entitled to.

Because of the adviser’s empathy and support, the customer was able to bring his tax affairs up to date, claim tax credits and maintain custody of his grandson.

The Budget process

In partnership with HM Treasury, we have continued to advise ministers on measures that are included in the annual Budget cycle. We help to ensure that equality considerations and any impact on equality are taken into account, as part of the policy decision-making process.

Ahead of fiscal events the Customer Equalities team reviews and provides advice on identifying and mitigating any equality impacts of proposed measures, and associated submissions. We report on any impact on equality in tax information and impact notes (TIINs) – and publish HMRC TIINs on GOV.UK. We reviewed 49 TIINs for the year to March 2018.

The Customer Equalities team also provides advice on how to identify any impact on equality in proposals for change projects that go to our Investment Appraisal Board, and details actions that we might take to minimise any risks and impact.

The team has also continued to engage proactively with colleagues to ensure that processes for the review of future policy measures are robust and fit-for-purpose and that training for tax professionals contains relevant information and guidance on customer equalities.

All projects involving change that are submitted to the Investment Appraisal Board are required to record formally that they have fully considered any impact on external customers and reviewed all equality implications. We handle about 6 projects a month. We review the Equality Impact Assessments, so that we can be sure that HMRC has considered equality in an appropriate and proportionate way.

Expanding accessibility options

In 2017 to 2018 our partnership with the Royal Association for the Deaf enabled HMRC NES colleagues to reach out and engage with 470 deaf customers using the Skype video relay service for more complex tax and tax credits queries.

The service will be expanded throughout 2018-19 and other subjects will become available to deaf customers including National Insurance Contributions, VAT and Child Benefit.

Our NES service continues to offer BSL interpreters to our deaf customers during face-to-face appointments at a convenient time and location to the customer at more than 300 venues across the UK.

Our Visually Impaired Media Unit has continued to meet customers’ requests for information in alternative formats. In 2017 to 2018 the unit converted more than 36,140 documents into alternative formats, which included large print, Braille, audio and plain text on CD.

Your Charter

Your Charter sets out what our customers can expect from us – and what we expect from them – as we transform our services and ways of working. Work is ongoing to look at how we can refresh the Charter and embed it across HMRC ensuring that the focus remains on Charter commitments in our day-to-day work and when designing our processes and services.

The responsibility for monitoring HMRC’s performance against the customer rights set out in Your Charter, and assessing how we help customers meet their obligations sits with a newly formed sub-committee of the HMRC Board, the Customer Experience Committee.

Our progress is reported in Your Charter - annual reports. The 2017 to 2018 report describes the Charter Committee’s activities and actions and shares the latest HMRC customer survey results, which gather regular feedback against Your Charter commitments.

Accessibility testing

We continue to create inclusive services and have them independently tested by the Digital Accessibility Centre.

Our Standards and Assurance team are working on an accessibility strategy for HMRC Digital.

There are some new challenges ahead, such as the EU directive on accessibility and we are preparing in advance for an update to the international accessibility standard known as WCAG 2.1, before the government is set to adopt it.

Transforming tax and payments for our customers

Expanding our digital services

The number of customers using our digital tax accounts continued to grow during 2017 to 2018, with around 15 million people accessing their Personal Tax Accounts. Business Tax Accounts were used by more than 3 million businesses.

This is important for the overall transformation of our customer services. Not only do digital tax accounts make it quicker and more convenient to pay the right tax at the right time, they reduce pressure on our more traditional customer services.

We wanted to achieve an average customer satisfaction rating of 80% for our digital services in 2017 to 2018. The number of survey responses we received increased by 43% from 6.7 million to 9.6 million and the percentage of customers who were either ‘satisfied’ or ‘very satisfied’ across all our digital services was marginally under 80% at 79.8%. We continue to listen to our customers to help us improve our service.

We are making smarter use of the data we hold, so customers can use their accounts to view their tax code, check their estimated tax liability and report changes using online iForms. Of the 1.3 million iForms we received last year we turned around 94.6% within 7 days, marginally below our 95% target. Customers can also decide how they want to receive information from us – for instance, by receiving all Pay As You Earn (PAYE) and Self Assessment correspondence online.

As well as digital tax accounts, we are developing innovative digital customer support services, for example, we held around 1.5 million live webchats with customers in 2017 to 2018 as an alternative to calling us. Answering customer queries via social media such as Twitter and Facebook is also a popular method of communication.

Through our Making Tax Digital for Business programme, we are working to give businesses modern, digital services that make it easier for them to get things right. Increasingly, we are working in partnership with the software industry so businesses and their tax agents can use products and services that interact seamlessly with our own systems.

Digital tax accounts and direct support

Customers rightly expect the same high levels of service from us as they do from banks, retailers and other organisations – and they increasingly want services to be delivered digitally, since it is faster and more convenient for them.

Our new digital services are continuing to grow, but we have also invested in traditional channels, including a 7-day service and voice biometric technology on our phones known as Voice ID. The voiceprint includes more than 100 unique physical and behavioural characteristics, as independent research has shown that a voiceprint is as unique to an individual as a fingerprint.

Voice ID makes calls to HMRC quicker, simpler and more secure for both customer and HMRC.

When customers contact us by phone with a query about PAYE, National Insurance (NI), Self Assessment (SA), tax credits or Child Benefit, our system first establishes their identity, then:

• takes them through security checks
• offers them the option to register their voice as their password
• provides general information about their query
• refers them to self-serve options
• transfers the customer to the correct team if they still want to speak to an adviser

When a customer contacts us the next time and uses their voice as their password, they no longer need to complete identity and verification checks.

As well as providing practical support to our teams, this gives our customers a better experience and allows us to focus on providing a quality service. Because customers have already passed security checks and told us why they are calling, this means our advisers can concentrate on making things better for the customer by resolving their problem more quickly.

Following our introduction of Voice ID, in accordance with the latest General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), we ask customers for their consent to process their voice identification data and let them know that they can continue to answer security questions to access their account if they wish.

We’ve published [guidance on GOV.UK on how we use Voice ID to reassure customers that HMRC will encrypt their data and store it in a UK data centre, where we are the data controllers. We will never share this information with anyone outside HMRC.

Customer phone calls

We received 46.7 million phone calls to our contact centres in 2017 to 2018. This is a decrease of 10% in demand to speak to an adviser, as more customers use our digital services.

Phone contact remains an important element of our interaction with customers, so we offer a 7-day telephony service and our customers are supported by automated messaging to access information and appropriate services.

For customers who need to speak to an adviser, our average speed in answering calls was 4 minutes and 28 seconds this year. This is within the 5 minute target we are funded by government to deliver, but was slower than the 3 minutes and 54 seconds we achieved in 2016 to 2017.

The percentage of customers who waited 10 minutes to be connected to an adviser was 14.6% against our target of no more than 15%. Going forward, we will continue to strive to optimise our phone performance within the funding available.   ##HMRC’s customer equality objectives 2016 to 2020

We published HMRC’s equality objectives on 12 May 2016 on GOV.UK. They provide a baseline from which we measure improvements in our performance and advance equality.

Customer equality objectives are:

1. customer understanding: to further develop our understanding about the impact of our services on customers and identify more clearly those who need enhanced support
2. digital services: to provide digital services that are accessible and usable by the widest possible range of customers
3. customer service: to ensure that our public sector duty is reflected in appropriate HMRC policies, processes, projects and training

Summary of our progress against each customer equality objective

We will further develop our understanding of our customers

We have been doing this by:

• improving our understanding of our customers especially those who need extra support, by conducting research, to find out what things our customers find difficult and what we can do to make things better
• we have 2 dedicated ‘customer labs’ where we work directly with our customers before new services are designed, and changes are rolled out. This means we can feel, hear and see things from the customer perspective, to make sure their interactions with us are as positive as possible by being simple and efficient
• reviewing our stakeholder engagement to improve its effectiveness
• continuing to proactively seek feedback on issues faced by the customer groups represented by our external stakeholders, so that we can improve both the accessibility of HMRC services and the overall customer experience
• continuing to discuss issues in customer-facing teams to improve our understanding and raising awareness of the support available – in response to feedback, we have been developing our guidance to support our people who are engaging with vulnerable customers and customers with mental health issues
• monitoring customer complaints to identify trends, help us to understand how we can support vulnerable customers, and proactively take action where necessary to improve our processes
• developing our analysis to incorporate complaints from customers who say they are feeling vulnerable, stressed or suicidal as a result of the pressures they are under

We will provide digital services that are accessible and usable by the widest possible range of customers

We have been doing this by:

• setting a minimum accessibility standard in the published Terms of Collaboration between HMRC and software developers, requiring developers to ‘make sure your digital tools meet WCAG 2.0. AA as a minimum or higher’ to ensure that available software will be compatible with a range of assistive technology
• continuing to develop our digital services so they are as inclusive as possible, providing extra help with digital and alternative formats when these are requested
• staying in regular contact with those responsible for introducing digital services to make sure they identify and address equality issues
• working through a number of issues with stakeholders with our Assisted Digital Working Group related to the provision of accessible digital services – this includes continued work with third party software developers to make sure the software that they develop is compatible with assistive technologies
• working with third party software developers to ensure that they are developing products that meet international accessibility standards
• working to make sure that Making Tax Digital (MTD) for Business software meets customer needs in a similar way to the existing software
• continuing to proactively address issues raised by our stakeholders about user testing and accessibility of online services

We will continue to improve customer service

We have been doing this by:

• developing and monitoring a programme of education for our people, particularly policy and frontline colleagues to help ensure they are aware of the importance of equality and understand the reasonable adjustments that they can offer customers to help them in a way that suits them best. This includes: staff seminars, workshops, online products, newsletters and improved guidance clearly signposted on our internal intranet pages
• continuing to embed equality into our policies, processes, projects and training and monitor our performance, so that we can demonstrate real improvements through our Public Sector Equality Duty reports
• continuing to explore the options to establish Customer Equality Champions and, or advocates across the department to promote best practice and to feedback on any issues or concerns to the Customer Equality team
• updating HMRC’s Additional Needs page on GOV.UK to make it clearer to customers about the range of support that we can provide for those who need extra help
• increasing our engagement with key internal stakeholders across HMRC, promoting best practice, auditing and reporting our findings to help make sure that there is a useful flow of equality information and consistent approach
• continuing to develop our assisted digital support arrangements as part of our MTD programme, reviewing all equality impact assessments that are submitted to the Investment Appraisal Board and other programme boards (approximately 6 projects each month) and the equality impacts of draft ministerial submissions
• making sure that training for tax professionals contains relevant information and guidance on customer equalities

We have also continued to review performance across HMRC to make sure we are meeting our Public Sector Equality Duties and to report on this as part of HMRC’s Annual Report and Accounts.

We have regular contact with voluntary and community sector (VCS) organisations to help us to provide a more effective level of service to diverse groups. This helps us make sure that if a customer discloses a condition and expresses a preference for a reasonable adjustment, we will record this on our systems, where possible, so that it ready to use when we help that customer in the future.

We are involved with VCS groups via various means, for example, the Disabled Customer Consultation Group, Mental Health Forum, Individual Stakeholder Forum, Assisted Digital Working Group and the Department for Work and Pensions Stakeholder Engagement Forum.

We are continuing to review our customer correspondence to make it as easy as possible for customers to understand what we require them to do and also to promote the extra support that is available.