They are quick to take hard-working Brits to task if their bookkeeping isn’t enough.
But shocking figures uncovered by the Daily Mail today suggest the taxman got creative with his arithmetic.
HMRC has long been one of the worst-performing government departments when it comes to working from home, with monthly occupancy figures for its London headquarters varying between 48 and 66 percent last month.
However, this data only indicates the proportion of tables that are actually occupied. The Mail can reveal that although HMRC’s office at 100 Parliament Street is home to 1,012 staff, it only contains 505 workplaces.
This means that the total number of civil servants actually attending is between 242 and 333 – only between 24 and 33 percent of their total workforce.
Jacob Rees-Mogg – who as former government efficiency minister introduced the scheme requiring government departments to publish occupancy figures – said last night: “The services they provide are simply not good enough.
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“If the public could actually go through when they called and get the right advice, and if people’s complaints were dealt with properly, it would be fine for the offices to sit empty. But that’s not happening.’
Meanwhile, fewer than four in ten civil servants working for the taxman across Britain actually turn up to the office each day. Despite complaints about poor customer service, only 38 per cent of HMRC staff in the UK were at their desks on average last month.
That figure dropped to just 24 per cent for mandarins based in the department’s Whitehall office.
It comes after a damning National Audit Office report found members of the public who wanted to speak to a tax adviser on the phone were put on hold for almost 23 minutes.
In January alone, 840,000 calls to HMRC went unanswered. Yet figures released to the Mail under the Freedom of Information Act show that on average just 23,269 of the department’s 61,186 staff nationwide call into the office each day.
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And more than 10,000 of HMRC’s 33,806 desks were typically empty for the week from April 22, the latest period for which figures are available.
In April, HMRC introduced new rules that reportedly limit employees from working from home to a maximum of two days a week. When asked why it did not increase office attendance to 60 percent, the source blamed holidays, absenteeism and “off-site” work.
And an HMRC spokesman insisted that “95 per cent of colleagues who were expected to come into the office did so in March 2024 and the majority met or exceeded their minimum office attendance expectations”.
A recent Money Mail investigation found that some taxpayers are being forced to endure year-long waits for tax refunds and nine-month delays in getting letters answered. Today’s findings also raise questions about the way HMRC and other departments record traffic figures for their Whitehall offices.
John O’Connell, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “The time the taxman picked up the phone has increased sharply and taxpayers will be in no doubt that the work-from-home culture has taken over. HMRC is partly to blame.”