Corporate report

About this report

Published 29 January 2021

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.

The report covers the period 1 April 2019 to 31 March 2020 for customer service and policy administration and HM Revenue and Customs’ (HMRC’s) diversity and inclusion data. It therefore reflects the policies and approaches that were current during this period.

It is divided into 3 sections:

• Part 1 covers customer service and policy activities
• Part 2 covers our people and values
• Part 3 covers HMRC’s workforce diversity data

Find previous HMRC compliance with public sector equality duty reports.

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 and customs authority. We’re here to collect the money that pays for the UK’s public services and give financial support to people.

While our core purpose never changes, we continue to see major societal, economic and technological shifts that are changing the way people live their lives, work and do business. At the same time, the impact of COVID-19 and the UK’s transition from the EU has further reinforced the need for a more flexible, resilient and responsive tax, payments and customs system.

To help us deliver our core purpose in a changing world, we’ve defined a new vision for HMRC: to be a trusted, modern tax and customs department.

A trusted, modern tax and customs department will fit with the way our customers run their businesses and their lives, reduce the tax gap, enhance the customer experience, keep costs down, and operate in a way that is recognised as fair. It means we’ll be on the side of our customers when they’re trying their best to get things right, while tackling the small minority who set out to cheat the system. It also means creating a great place to work in HMRC by nurturing a culture of respect for all our colleagues.

Our strategic objectives

To help us deliver our vital purpose, in 2019 to 2020, we had 3 strategic objectives to guide everything we do, and this report is based on these:

• collect revenues due and bear down on avoidance and evasion: it’s our responsibility to make sure the tax system functions well so that, ultimately, we bring in in more and no less than the tax due under the law.
• transform tax and payments for our customers: we want to use what we know about our customers’ needs to make it easy as possible to deal with us
• design and deliver 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

Looking ahead, to achieve our vision to be a trusted, modern tax and customs department, we have launched new strategic objectives during 2020 to 2021 and will report against these in next year’s report.

Our values

All of our activity is underpinned by the same core values:

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

Your Charter – rights and obligations

We want to give you a professional service; one that is fair, accurate and based on mutual trust and respect. We also want to make it as easy as we can for you to get things right.

Your Charter explains what you can expect from us and what we expect from you.

The HMRC Charter was updated after year-end of this report, in November 2020.

Our achievements in 2019 to 2020

These include:

• £636.7 billion total tax revenues collected (1.4% increase on 2018 to 2019)
• £36.90 billion generated in additional tax through tackling avoidance, evasion and non-compliance
• £3 billion raised since 2010 from tackling offshore tax evasion
• 1,958 supervisory interventions to prevent money laundering
• 95.3% of tax due secured – highest ever figure (2018 to 2019 is the latest available estimate)
• 12.7 million children supported by Child Benefit
• more than 15,000 customers supported through face-to-face appointments with our Extra Support services
• 12.5 million post items responded to from customers
• more than 1.3 million businesses signed up for Making Tax Digital for VAT
• 850,000 customers helped with Self Assessment queries by phone or webchat in January 2020
• 94% of Self Assessment tax returns were filed online
• 81.6% customer satisfaction with our digital services (target 80%)

Our commitment to transparency

To provide greater transparency around our customer contact performance, we have broadened our measurement of customer experience, published more supporting data on our telephone, post and customs processes. We also tested new customer experience measures.

In the first half of this financial year, we did not deliver the customer service we would have liked, due to resourcing challenges carried forward from the financial year 2018 to 2019, plus higher than expected customer demand. In the second half of the year our performance improved steadily and was close to where we wanted it to be, but we couldn’t meet all our targets.

How HMRC is supporting customers through coronavirus

From March 2020, COVID-19 resulted in changes to customer behaviour and the introduction of new support schemes, which affected our ability to maintain performance. This impact on our customer service channels will continue into financial year 2020 to 2021. We recognise the challenges businesses and individuals face and will take them into account in our approach to collecting revenues due.

COVID-19 is a challenge our people are still rising to with pride and determination — but it’s also changed some of the nature of what we do. We’re now a vital part of the UK’s national resilience and crisis response, as well as discharging our role as a tax authority.

As the pandemic continues, our priorities are to help people cope with the economic impact, help businesses get ready for the end of the EU exit transition and protect the system from criminal attacks. This is the right thing to do, but it has short term implications for our usual day-to-day services.

Our aim is to administer the tax system in a way that takes account of the impact of the pandemic on our customers and their ability to meet their tax obligations.

In particular, where people cannot pay their tax, we have allowed them to defer payment, and to pay off their debts over time in affordable instalments. Also, where people cannot deal with our compliance enquiries, we have deferred these if possible. This way, our customers can concentrate on making sure their businesses survive and recover from the effect of the pandemic.

The work we are doing on COVID-19, as well as EU exit, has inevitably meant that we have had to divert resources away from other areas of our work, notably supporting customers to handle their regular tax affairs. However, we have continued to protect the tax system and the COVID-19 support schemes from those who try to defraud or abuse the system.

Read more on how we’ve supported the government’s response to COVID-19, in HMRC’s 2019 to 2020 Annual Report and Accounts.

Working with agents

Good tax advisers make it easier to get tax right, for clients and for HMRC. We work in partnership with agents and their professional bodies to improve standards and support for our customers and have published a Call for Evidence on raising standards in the tax advice market to give taxpayers more assurance that the advice they are receiving is reliable.

Where agents fall short of the standards expected, we are increasingly reporting them to their professional bodies and taking appropriate action if they are not a member of a professional body.

We’ve developed services which enable tax agents to deal with us digitally on behalf of their clients. The Agent Services online account now allows agents to act for their clients for Making Tax Digital VAT, Capital Gains Tax and to register trusts. We’re also updating agent guidance on GOV.UK following feedback via our Agent Forum.

To further strengthen our engagement with agents and intermediaries, we reviewed our various stakeholder forums this year, relaunching the Representative Bodies Steering Group (formerly Joint Initiative Steering Group) and launching a new advisory body on digital services. We work with professional bodies to provide updates on areas of our work that have an impact on agents and take on board their feedback and concerns.

Working with voluntary organisations

We have regular contact with voluntary and community sector (VCS) 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.

Members of the voluntary and community sector have played a vital role in supporting HMRC customers during the pandemic, as their efforts have ensured we have reached as many customers as possible.

This has prevented people from missing out on the support which is available, and to have the confidence to take up some of the many COVID-19 initiatives available, such as the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme and Self-employment Income Support Scheme.

The Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme and Self-employment Income Support Scheme were 2 elements of a comprehensive package of support for individuals and businesses. The package also included Bounce Back loans, tax deferrals, rental support, increased levels of Universal Credit, mortgage holidays, other business support grants and further measures into the next financial year 2020 to 2021.

Read more on HMRC’s engagement with voluntary and community groups and details of grant funding in Part 1 of this report.

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