Accuracy In Processing Income Tax

This NAO report, examines the Department of HM Revenue and Customs accuracy in processing Self Assessment Tax forms and the PAYE scheme for Income Tax. In the 2006-07, the Department collected £149 billion in Income Tax, dealing with the tax affairs of some 36 million taxpayers. In total, £125 billion was collected via employers through the PAYE scheme and £24 billion from self employed people, and others with additional income through the Tax Self Assessment. The Department needs to spend about £1.7 billion per year in administering Income Tax, with the processing taking place across the Department's 300 offices. This report draws some of the following conclusions: that the correct tax assessment occurs in 95.4% of cases; there is a 96.5% accuracy in processing Self Assessment, whilst PAYE cases were 95.1% accurate (but 25% of PAYE cases are more complex, with more processing needed, and so a greater error rate, at 82.1%, is found in these instances). The Department itself estimates inaccurate processing has led to 3.6 million errors in Self Assessment and 2.8 million errors on PAYE in 2006-07. Taking all the various processing errors together, just over 1 million taxpayers in this period had received £125 million in underpayments of tax and £157 million in overpayments. The most frequent type of error is in the Department's calculation of tax codes, which are used by employers to calculate deductions of income tax from employees' pay, with 63% of the PAYE error rate relating to tax codes. Among the report's recommendations are: that HM Customs & Revenue should continue with the quality monitoring, identifying specific types of error; they should facilitate the sharing of good practice across the tax offices; further develop an early warning system, through the analysis of trends in monthly data; separate out more complex cases to process by specialised teams and develop a customer-focused approach by tracking the effect of error rates on the different taxpayer groups.

In 2007-08, HMRC received more than a quarter of the 4 million Tax Credit renewals forms in July (the renewal deadline) and it processed half of the 8.2 million Income Tax Self Assessment returns during January to March. At busier times customers experience delays on their correspondence and receive a less responsive service. In the lead up to the Income Tax Self Assessment deadline in January 2008, HMRC answered just two thirds of the 7 million telephone calls made to its contact centres. By encouraging more customers to file tax returns online and removing the need for some returns, HMRC has smoothed peaks in workload and released resources of £7 million a year. The peak in Tax Credit renewal work has, however, increased as the deadline has been brought forward to reduce overpayments. Using different processing targets throughout the year and giving customers more information about how long their information will take to process during peak periods could help spread work out throughout the year. During busy periods, HMRC tends to process simpler Income Tax cases, postponing more complex checks and less urgent work. During peak periods, staff productivity is higher, partly reflecting the simpler cases, but HMRC also experiences increased staff sickness absence. The experience of HMRC and other organisations is that between 15 per cent and 40 per cent of contact with customers is avoidable. Reducing the number of avoidable calls by 15 per cent could release resources of up to £23 million a year or 11 per cent of its annual spending on contact centres.

This NAO report examines the progress made by the Inland Revenue (now HM Revenue and Customs) to help ensure that correct Income Tax returns are sent on time from those who are required to submit them, focusing on the following issues: the reasons why taxpayers should file them on time and accurately; the Department's performance in getting returns in by the deadline and in chasing late returns; accuracy of taxpayers in submitting returns and of the Department in processing them; and the need to make forms easier for people to complete in order to reduce compliance and processing costs. The report makes a number of recommendations for improvements focused on seven areas, including achieving the 2008 Public Service Agreement target for the proportion of taxpayers who file on time; using sanctions to encourage timeliness of tax returns; improving the accuracy of Revenue processing methods; and improving the clarity of the self assessment form.

Preferential regimes continue to be a key pressure area. Current concerns are primarily about preferential regimes which can be used for artificial profit shifting and about a lack of transparency in connection with certain rulings. The report sets out an agreed methodology to assess whether there is substantial activity. In the context of IP regimes such as patent boxes, agreement was reached on the nexus approach which uses expenditures as a proxy for substantial activity and ensures that taxpayers can only benefit from IP regimes where they engaged in research and development and incurred actual expenditures on such activities. The same principle can also be applied to other preferential regimes so that such regimes are found to require substantial activity where the taxpayer undertook the core income generating activities. In the area of transparency, a framework has been agreed for the compulsory spontaneous exchange of information on rulings that could give rise to BEPS concerns in the absence of such exchange. The results of the application of the existing factors applied by the FHTP, and the elaborated substantial activity and transparency factors, to a number of preferential regimes are included in this report.

Tax Administration 2015 is a comprehensive survey of tax administration systems, practices and performance across 56 advanced and emerging economies (including all OECD, EU, and G20 members).