Bureau Recommends: Taxpayers unaware of right to appeal HMRC bills
The HMRC tax bill complaints system is ‘woefully inadequate’, experts say.
HM Revenue & Customs has come under fire again today, as an investigation reveals that tens of thousands of complaints about tax demands are never investigated by an impartial judge.
The report, by the Daily Mail’s Money section, found that almost 30,000 complaints about tax to pay, which are rejected by HMRC, could have been overturned by an impartial Adjudicator.
The Mail’s report is confusingly written, but attempts to explain that taxpayers initially appeal to HMRC to dispute their bills. If the Revenue rejects their complaint, people can then take their case to the Adjudicator.
But the Mail found that up to April last year, 87,300 cases had been rejected. Following that, just 716 people had gone on to take their case to the independent Adjudicator’s Office.
Yet once cases reach the Adjudicator, around one in every four is upheld.
The problem, critics say, is that many taxpayers do not know that the option exists to take their complaint to an independent referee.
Information given to those whose appeals are turned down includes only a website address for the Adjudicator, not a telephone or postal address.
Chas Roy-Chowdhury, head of tax at the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, told the Mail: ‘There’s a serious lack of information for individuals. A lot of people don’t know what the Adjudicator does or how it works.
‘It’s woefully inadequate to have it mentioned at the bottom of the letter in a paragraph. There needs to be a much greater clarification about it from HMRC.’
Robin Williamson, of campaigning body the Low Income Tax Reform Group, agreed: ‘There’s a big reluctance at HMRC to be open and public about ways of redress. Long before the tax demand furore kicked off, we were telling HMRC to be more open about the appeals process.’
However, an HMRC spokesman maintained that: ‘We clearly set out details of how to refer a complaint once the internal review has been exhausted.’
To read the full article, click here. To find out more about the Adjudicator’s Office, click here.
