Calling HMRC costs Taxpayers £97m

According to the National Audit Office, £97m was wasted by Taxpayers last year phoning HMRC.

This was broken down as:

• £66m waiting on the phone
• £21m if actually got through to speak to someone
• £10m on the cost of the call

Last autumn the waiting time on the self-assessment number was an average 47 minutes.

So what can you do?

• Try and avoid having to speak to HMRC – if you get everything set up properly and your accountant gets all your compliance done on time (personal tax, corporate tax, PAYE RTI reporting , CIS returns etc) then there should be no need to speak to HMRC
• Write to HMRC rather than call them or get your accountant to write to them - it might be quicker to write to HMRC than wait on the phone (and you also then have a record of that communication)
• If you have to ring them then have a hands free phone or a headset so you can get on with something else whilst you’re on hold