I have received a “simple assessment” invoice from HMRC. The letter demands overdue tax from 2018, but I have never received any prior communication about this, and my tax is deducted at source. I feared it might be a scam since the phone number on the letter does not match any of those listed on HMRC’s website. The obvious solution was to check with HMRC, but it was uncontactable. All the phone lines I tried stated they had 50-minute waiting times. Its chatbot directed me to an email address that produced an automatic reply saying it couldn’t help. So I have a letter that says that if I don’t pay tax I never knew I owed within 28 days, debt collectors will be appointed. But I have no way to check if the letter is genuine.
HW, Cambridge
HMRC blames you and me for its being incommunicado. Its chief executive Jim Harra told the Treasury select committee that people were clogging up the phone lines with “unnecessary” questions that could be answered by the website. More than a quarter of calls to HMRC are cut off or abandoned because of record waiting times. HMRC’s solution? To close its tax helplines for six months each year from April to force taxpayers to answer queries online – a decision that was rapidly reversed.
You could, and would, have contacted it online if it had updated its website. Simple assessment was set up in the 2016-17 tax year to claw back pay-as-you-earn underpayments that can’t be collected automatically. It’s also used to collect tax on state pensions.
The letters are unnervingly bald – yours demanded, without calculations or explanation, £748 – and, as you say, the phone number provided is different from those published by HMRC. For these reasons, many others have assumed it was a scam, according to the Low Income Tax Reform Group (LITRG).
Last summer, HMRC promised to add simple assessments to the web page that helps recipients check whether one of its letters is genuine, but failed to do so. “We are concerned that HMRC digital services are not yet of a sufficient standard to cut telephone services,” said LITRG senior manager Kelly Sizer. “In the case of simple assessment, we understand it is not yet possible to use HMRC’s online services to arrange to pay in instalments.”
HMRC said it was improving customer service by upgrading its website to encourage people to connect online. It told me that your underpayment was communicated to you in October 2018, but that outstanding simple assessment debts were placed on hold until last year because of the pandemic, which is why you and, presumably, many others, are belatedly receiving demands.
Online payments are apparently no longer possible when more than two years have elapsed, so the debt was not flagged up on your online account. HMRC said affordable payment plans would be available online from next April, adding: “We’ve written to HW to explain why she received this bill and encouraged her to contact us to discuss a pay arrangement if she will struggle to pay.”
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