Corporate report

About this report

Published 31 January 2020

About this report

This report contains equality information required by regulation 2 of the Equality Act Specific Duty Regulations (SI 2011/2260). It shows how the department complies with the public sector equality duty in section 149 of the Equality Act 2010 in relation to its diversity and inclusion, customer, and policy administration activities.

It covers the period 1 April 2018 to 31 March 2019 for customer service and policy administration and HM Revenue and Customs’ (HMRC’s) diversity and inclusion data.

Part 1 of the report covers customer service and policy activities.

Part 2 of the report covers HMRC’s workforce diversity data.

Previous editions may be found under HMRC’s corporate reports on GOV.UK.

Equality regulations

The equality regulations require all public bodies to:

• eliminate unlawful discrimination, harassment and victimisation
• advance equality of opportunity
• foster good relations between people who share a protected characteristic and those who don’t

Promoting equality of opportunity means public bodies have to:

• remove or minimise disadvantages for groups of people
• take steps to meet the needs of protected groups of people
• encourage all groups of people to participate in public life or other activity in situations where their participation is low

Background

Our vital purpose

We are the UK’s tax, payments and customs authority: we collect the money that pays for the UK’s public services and help families and individuals with targeted financial support.

Our work touches the lives of everyone in the UK. It funds our schools and hospitals, our roads and infrastructure, and services that keep us safe and protect our environment. It supports our economy and helps to give everyone a stake in society.

HMRC is entrusted with running a healthy tax administration that gets tax right for everyone. That means a tax administration that ensures people and businesses pay the tax they owe and receive what they are entitled to, by making it easy for them to meet their obligations and tackling the dishonest minority who don’t. It needs to be trusted by the public and seen to be fair, with the right safeguards in place to protect people who need help with their tax affairs or against whom HMRC takes enforcement action.

Our objectives

To help us deliver our vital purpose, we have 3 strategic objectives that guide everything we do:

• collecting revenues due and bearing down on avoidance and evasion: it’s our responsibility to make sure the tax system functions well so that, ultimately, we bring in no more and no less than the tax due under the law
• transforming tax and payments for our customers: we want to use what we know about our customers’ needs to make it as easy as possible to deal with us
• designing and delivering a professional, efficient and engaged organisation: we’re modernising how we work, reducing our costs, operating in more sustainable ways and working hard to make HMRC a great place to work

We are currently updating our strategic objectives and next year’s report will reflect these changes.

Our achievements

Our achievements in 2018 to 2019 include:

• £627.9 billion revenue generated, a 3.6% increase on 2017 to 2018 revenue. An additional £34.1 billion tax was generated by tackling avoidance, evasion and non-compliance and more than £2.9 billion was raised from tackling offshore tax initiatives
• 93.5% Self Assessment tax returns were filed online
• 19 million customers signed up for Personal Tax Accounts, since launch
• 0.9 million tax credits renewals were online
• we made £576 million total sustainable cost savings
• 3.3 million families received tax credits
• 80.4% customers were satisfied or very satisfied with our digital service
• £24.4 million National Minimum Wage arrears were identified and recovered on behalf of workers
• 90,000 Help to Save accounts were opened

Our people and values

We have a skilled workforce of around 58,700 full-time equivalent employees (including Revenue and Customs Digital Technology Services Ltd) – from customer service advisers and policy experts to fraud investigators and data analysts.

All these people have an important role to play in making it easy for customers to get tax right and hard for the dishonest minority to avoid paying what they owe. Our total headcount was 63,950 as at 31 March 2019, which includes people working part-time and is the figure we use when measuring our diversity data in Part 2 of this report.

We’re changing the way we work to deliver our objectives in a changing world – developing new skills and using new technology – but all our activity is underpinned by the same core values:

• we are professional
• we are innovative
• we show respect
• we act with integrity

Our commitment to transparency

We want to continue improving trust between ourselves and our customers. Our customers rightly expect us to act with transparency and treat everyone fairly – creating a level playing field and being open about the decisions we take, and why.

This trust and fairness is a crucial part of building a transparent system that works for all our customers, whether they are an individual or business. We know we have work to do to achieve this. We’re focussed on demonstrating the integrity of our systems, providing support to those who need it, and being open about the way we run HMRC, so that everyone can judge for themselves how fairly we act and how well we’re doing.

Developing better ways to serve our customers

Increasingly, we are administering tax and delivering our customer services digitally. Our customers deal with us through digital services and we have introduced digital Personal Tax Accounts, a mobile app and tax credits payment tracker. This year, we delivered a flagship pilot service for VAT registered businesses (Making Tax Digital for Business launched fully on 1 April 2019).

We are still committed to providing direct support to those who need it, such as those with more complex tax affairs and customers who require extra assistance.

Supporting intermediaries

We are working closely with those who can help us to support our customers and collect tax – such as employers, through their role in administering PAYE, or others who can collect data to pre-populate digital tax accounts, such as banks and building societies. Where possible, we use these intermediaries to apply correct tax calculations and withhold tax on our behalf and we encourage them to support customers with their tax obligations.

We are also working with software developers so that our plans align with software being developed for business customers. The more straightforward we can make it for businesses to pay their taxes and interact with us using their own software, the more efficiently we can collect revenue.

Working with agents

Agents play a key role in helping people comply with their tax obligations and we welcome their use where they add value in helping their clients to get their affairs right. We’re working to develop our services for tax agents, so they can deal with us across all taxes on behalf of their clients. Our Agent Services online account assures the status of an agent and protects access to client data. Agents can now use the account to act for their clients under Making Tax Digital, or to register a trust.

We’re also strengthening our engagement with agents and meet frequently with their professional bodies. In January 2018, we published a revised HMRC standard for agents. Where we find behaviours that fall short, we increasingly report those agents to their professional bodies to take appropriate action.

Working with voluntary organisations

We have regular contact with voluntary and community sector 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 is ready to use when we help that customer in the future.

We are involved with voluntary and community groups via various means, for example, the Additional Needs Working Group, Individual Stakeholder Forum, and the Department for Work and Pensions Stakeholder Engagement Forum.

Go to next section: Part 1: our customer service and policy work.