Hm Revenue Customs Transformation Programme

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.

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.

The Compliance and Enforcement Programme , a major HMRC programme to improve the way it tackles evasion, delivered £4.32 billion of additional tax yield between 2006 and 2011. It also forecasts that it will generate an additional £8.87 billion of yield between 2011-12 and 2014-15. It also reduced staff numbers and introduced a range of improvements in its compliance work. The Department has introduced new capabilities, notably the use of IT to identify incidences of evasion more effectively, although it is not yet exploiting the full potential of the new systems. It also had to defer and reduce the scope of projects to keep within annual budgetary limits, leading to reductions in benefits. The Compliance and Enforcement Programme cost £387 million to 2011-12 and was made up of over 40 projects. It aimed to increase compliance yield - the measure of additional tax arising from compliance work - by £4.56 billion between 2006-2011. However, HMRC will not achieve all of the Programme's forecast benefits because of changes to scope or slippage in delivering projects, as well as over-optimism in its forecasts. HMRC did not routinely measure the impact of the Programme on customer experience and it could achieve better value for money from its investment in compliance work by improved understanding of the impact of individual projects and ensuring that its staff have the capacity to exploit new systems to the full

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.

Dated May 2007. On cover: Integrating and growing stronger. Spring 2007

HMRC is the UK's tax administration, responsible for administering income tax, corporation tax, VAT, National Insurance contributions, excise dutes, environmental taxes, insurance premium tax, capital gains tax, petroleum revenue tax and stamp duty. It is also responsible for the payment of tax credits, child benefit and child trust fund endowments. Some of the achievements recorded for the first part of 2009-10 include: collection of over £209 billion in revenue; delivery of the biggest change to PAYE system in 20 years with the launch of the new PAYE Service and Work Management System (MPPC); delivery of the largest learning intervention in the UK this year with that new service; delivered 14 full or partial vacations of HMRC locations resulting in savings of £6.8 million; achieving platinum status in the Business in the Community Corporate Responsibility Index and the launching of the Health in Pregnancy Grant

The Treasury Sub-Committee calls for much greater transparency from the Treasury in accounting for the liabilities taken on by the nationalisation and part-nationalisation of financial institutions. The report recommends that these disclosures appear in the annual Treasury resource accounts. Furthermore they should be at least as comprehensive as those made by major corporations and go further than meeting the minimum acceptable accounting standards. In particular, the Report notes that the Treasury's 2007-08 Annual Report and Accounts cover the Government's financial relationship with Northern Rock but do not comment on its performance under temporary public ownership. Given the level of interest in the fully nationalised institutions of Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley, and the Treasury's role in their governance, the report recommends that key performance information for these institutions be published in the resource accounts as well. The wholesale nationalisation of Northern Rock, and Bradford & Bingley has created governance responsibilities for the Treasury while these entities remain under public ownership. The Government's announcements of October 2008 created further responsibilities regarding the oversight of part-nationalised banks, and created a new body, UK Financial Investments (UKFI). The report calls for UKFI to report annually to Parliament and to be accountable to the Treasury Committee. The Committee wants the Government to identify and publish performance indicators for UKFI, and to report against these measures on a six-monthly basis. All these developments are additional challenges for the Treasury and require it to act in areas its current staff base may not be fully equipped for or familiar with. The Government must ensure the Treasury is sufficiently resourced to manage the extended responsibilities arising from the economic downturn, especially those regarding financial stability.

The Chancellor's departments faced extraordinary challenges during 2008-09, mainly arising from the need to respond to the emerging financial crisis and associated economic downturn. The report concludes that it is very difficult to draw final conclusions regarding their level of success - too much remains unfinished business. It draws attention, in particular, to the new relationship between the Treasury and UKFI, and recommends that the Government considers whether the formal terms of the relationship need some re-definition in the light of experience. The report is particularly concerned by the dire results for HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) of a cross-Government staff survey pilot study. The Report calls for HMRC management to publish a clear and detailed plan to provide focus and direction to their efforts to re-engage with their workforce. Noting a rise in customer complaints and that, on average, only 57 per cent of calls to HMRC contact centres were answered during 2008-09. HMRC should publish more data to enable effective scrutiny of its performance against its targets, data which is essential for tax gaps to be closed and for the take up of the working tax credit to be assessed and improved. The Report is critical of the failure of most departments to provide accurate and timely monthly in-year figures to the Treasury. Other sections of the report cover National Savings & Investment, the revaluation of UK statutory ports and the performance of the Royal Mint.