HM Revenue & Customs' Transformation Programme
HM Revenue & Customs' Transformation Programme

Author: Great Britain. National Audit Office

Publisher: The Stationery Office

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 40

ISBN-13: 9780102954241

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Eighteen months into an ambitious programme to transform HMRC, the Department has spent £851 million and achieved estimated benefits of £2.4 billion. These benefits are mainly from activities already underway when the programme began. Changes to funding have led the Department to revise and postpone parts of the programme, and the overall benefits expected carry high levels of uncertainty.A report out today by the National Audit Office found that most of the £11.5 billion benefits are expected to come from an increased tax yield (£6.3 billion) and transaction savings to business and government (£4.1 billion). The estimate of additional tax yield is volatile and assumes collection in full. The Department has made progress in developing its systems and processes and enhanced its project and financial management skills to deliver the programme. For most programmes it has developed governance processes and set out responsibilities for managing the projects. It delivered, as planned, one major programme in the first 18 months and has implemented parts of other programmes. It is taking action to improve implementation plans and milestones, risk management and contingency plans for some other programmes. A major driver of the programme is the Department's targets to achieve efficiency savings of 5 per cent a year. Changes in funding and content of the programme during 2007-08 delayed the completion of the business cases for individual programmes. The Department has approved business cases for 10 programmes and plans to complete the remaining three over Summer 2008. Finalising the component parts of the transformation programme is a critical step, particularly as the Department expects the funding available to peak in 2008-09 and reduce thereafter.Changing the culture of the Department to become more customer-focused is an important part of the programme. In any change programme staff satisfaction might be expected to decline and recent surveys indicate morale remains at a low ebb. The Department needs to more actively demonstrate the benefits to its staff and manage the expectations of customers as many of the improvements for them are scheduled for 2011 and beyond.

Reducing costs in HM Revenue & Customs
Reducing costs in HM Revenue & Customs

Author: Great Britain: National Audit Office

Publisher: The Stationery Office

Published: 2011-07-20

Total Pages: 40

ISBN-13: 9780102969900

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HM Revenue & Customs faces a significant challenge in securing a £1.6 billion reduction in running costs over the next four years, at the same time as increasing tax revenues, improving customer service and achieving reductions in welfare payments. HMRC has reported savings of some £1.4 billion since 2005. To achieve its cost reductions it plans to implement 24 change projects and other measures including savings in the provision of IT services, improvements in productivity, reduced sickness absence and headcount reductions. The size and shape of HMRC will change substantially as it reduces staff numbers by 10,000 and significantly reduces the number of offices it operates. HMRC has established a clear vision and specified operational priorities and revenue targets. It has not yet sufficiently defined the business performance and customer service it intends to achieve by 2015. It has good information on the different costs it incurs but only limited information on the cost of its end-to-end processes and on the cost of servicing different customers groups. It also has a limited understanding of the link between the cost and value of its activities. This has restricted its ability to assess fully the impact of cost reductions on business performance. HMRC has made no allowance in its cost reduction plans for under-delivery or slippage, and currently has no reserve of proposals on which to draw. HMRC has begun to implement its cost reduction plans but has not yet assessed all the dependencies between projects and the critical path for delivery.

HM Revenue & Customs
HM Revenue & Customs

Author: Great Britain. National Audit Office

Publisher: The Stationery Office

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 40

ISBN-13: 9780102954395

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Although most tax payments are made on time, around one-third are not. The level of debt in HM Revenue and Customs fluctuates on a daily basis. The difference is mainly because these systems exclude some debt that is due but is paid almost immediately and there are timing differences in when debt is downloaded from the main tax systems. This report analyses trends in debt levels using figures from the debt management systems. It examines: The Department's performance in managing debt; how the Department manages and prioritises debts; the Department's methods for collecting debt and how it encourages taxpayers to pay on time. It finds that though the Department has improved its management of tax debt, over the last year debt as a proportion of net receipts and the age of debt has increased on some taxes.

Progress on Reducing Costs
Progress on Reducing Costs

Author: Great Britain: National Audit Office

Publisher: The Stationery Office

Published: 2013-02-07

Total Pages: 48

ISBN-13: 9780102981278

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In challenging circumstances in 2011-12, HM Revenue and Customs maintained its performance in key strategic areas at the same time as reducing its staff and spending. The challenge for HMRC will be to make more and deeper reductions over the spending review period while increasing tax revenues, improving customer service and introducing its 'real time information' project and changes to benefits and credits. HMRC made £296 million of savings in 2011-12, exceeding its target by 19 per cent. This is about a third of the total savings it is required to make over the four years of the spending review period. However, HMRC expects these projects to save £162 million less over the spending review period than when the NAO last reported on this subject, in July 2011. This is partly because its forecasts are now more refined and realistic, and partly because, as some projects took longer to start, the benefits will take longer to be realised. HMRC has strengthened how it manages its change programme in ways that address NAO and Public Accounts Committee recommendations. The Department has also started to address the recommendations that it should improve its understanding of interdependencies between projects and of the cost and value of its activities though it has more to do in these areas. At September 2012, HMRC was on track to exceed its 2012-13 cost reduction target by £29 million. However, the reduction in planned savings being delivered by change projects means that HMRC needs to find £66 million more savings than it originally planned through other initiatives

HM Revenue and Customs
HM Revenue and Customs

Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts

Publisher: The Stationery Office

Published: 2007-06-12

Total Pages: 52

ISBN-13: 0215034376

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In January 2004, the Inland Revenue entered into a contract with Capgemini to provide IT services to support the Department's business. The contract, known as ASPIRE (Acquiring Strategic Partners for the Inland Revenue), replaced two previous contracts with EDS and Accenture and, following the merger of the Inland Revenue and HM Customs & Excise in 2005, the latter's IT services contract with Fujitsu was incorporated within ASPIRE in April 2006. This change from one supplier to another was the first of this scale in the public sector, and the contract provides wider lessons for the public sector in re-competing major contracts, particularly relating to the payment of transition costs. The cost of the contract has risen from £2.83 billion to £8.5 billion over the 10 year term. Following on from a NAO report on this topic (HCP 938, session 2005-06; ISBN 9780102939170) published in July 2006, the Committee's report examines the procurement process, the transition to a new supplier and the performance of the ASPIRE contract to date. Findings include: i) before concluding the deal, the Department should have evaluated bids against a range of demands for IT services and analysed the effect of different scenarios on suppliers' prices and profit margins; ii) it should have evaluated the performance of consultants and the lessons to be learned from their use, not only for their own benefit but for that of other departments; iii) by contributing to bid costs and paying transition costs to secure competition for the contract, the Department incurred a premium of £51.9 million; iv) it should set more challenging performance targets to impose sufficient discipline on suppliers; and v) the Government should not be placed in the invidious position of having to commission further work from a contractor in order to recover compensation for underperformance.

Fleeced!
Fleeced!

Author: David Craig

Publisher: Constable

Published: 2013-07-25

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1472112245

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Over the past decade some £3 trillion - equivalent to £50,000 for every person in Britain - has been taken from us by the ruling elites. Half was wasted in a splurge of poorly-managed public spending in the 'boom', while the other half evaporated in the 'bust' - siphoned off by city bonuses, vaporised by a collapse in pension savings and extorted to bail out the banking sector. In their explosive new book, David Craig and Matthew Elliott trace where the money has gone and who has become richer as a result. They name and shame the 'guilty': the incompetent bureaucrats that fail to deliver the services the taxpayer deserves; the multitude of ineffective regulators and watchdogs; the politicians that have betrayed our democracy and enriched themselves; and the self-serving and arrogant city bankers. Moreover, they calculate the enormous debt that awaits the British taxpayer as a result of our rulers' avarice and economic mismanagement. Fleeced! charts the greatest impoverishment and tax swindle of the public in British history.

Hm Revenue and Customs
Hm Revenue and Customs

Author: House of Commons Public Accounts Commi

Publisher: The Stationery Office

Published: 2009-03-24

Total Pages: 52

ISBN-13: 9780215529213

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In this report the Committee of Public Accounts examines HM Revenue and Customs' (the Department) administration of tax credits and also examines the Department on its collection of income tax through PAYE and Self Assessment. The Department overpaid £7.3 billion in the first four years of the tax credits scheme and underpaid more than £2.0 billion. By the end of March 2008, it had collected £2.7 billion (37 per cent) of this debt and written off £1 billion (14 per cent). £3.6 billion of the total of overpayments are outstanding and the Department is unlikely to recover £1.8 billion. Overpayments continue to affect many people, including some of the most vulnerable in society. Claimants are not given the support they need in making claims and too much is assumed on the part of claimants in their understanding the complex tax credits system. Tax credits suffer from high rates of error and fraud: in 2006-07 claimant error and fraud is estimated to have led to incorrect payments of between £1.31 billion and £1.54 billion. In 2007-08, the Department collected £225 billion in income tax and national insurance contributions through the Pay As You Earn (PAYE) system. The planned transfer of the administration of PAYE to its National Insurance Recording System has been delayed, adding to the backlog of tax cases - currently 16 million - that must be checked manually. In 2007-08, the Department collected £30.2 billion (net) through the Self Assessment system. A total of 46 per cent of Self Assessment returns were filed online, significantly exceeding the 35 per cent target, though some 34 per cent of filed returns may be inaccurate, putting between £2.9 billion to £3.7 billion tax at risk.