The HMRC communication is about plans for providing more of their support and services to agents through digital channels.
The announcement says:
We will be working closely with agents’ representative bodies to explore what will work best and ensure that we design new digital services that meet agents’ needs and improve the quality and speed of our responses. Key messages In line with the Government’s ‘Digital by Default’ agenda HMRC is looking at how it can provide greater choice and more flexible services to agents (and all customers) through increased use of digital channels. We have recently re-organised our Business Customer and Strategy teams, bringing together the work previously done on agent engagement through Working Together and the Agent Account Manager (AAM) service and the work on SME education, into one team, Digital Support for Business and Agents. The new team will build on successes in reaching and engaging SME’s through digital tools. We will work with agents and their professional bodies to develop new methods for supporting agents digitally whilst ensuring that the digital support we provide improves our engagement and meets agents’ needs. Moving towards digital support and services means that we will inevitably take a step back from some of our face-to-face engagement. That does not mean we will withdraw from face- to-face entirely but we will explore the potential, in discussions with agents’ representatives, for engaging in a different way and taking a fresh approach to, for example, how we support meetings (including Working Together meetings) and meet requests for speakers. We know that Working Together is about a lot more than just local meetings. It looks for ways to improve HMRC’s operations for the benefit of tax agents, their clients and HMRC. We will not lose sight of this valuable function, which enables agents and professional bodies to alert HMRC at an early stage to glitches in the tax system and make suggestions to improve services for its customers. We'll be looking across the piece at how issues are reported to HMRC and how, in turn, updates on progress are reported back to agents, to see if we can identify more effective and quicker ways of managing issues through the use of digital tools. We are very keen to hear agents’ views on how the right digital support for agents should be developed. We plan to use the next meeting of the Agents/HMRC Virtual Communications Group on 20th August to begin a conversation about this with the representative bodies and we will also be discussing our proposals with agents in local Working Together groups. What will be different? Nothing is going to change overnight but we do need to think, in line with our digital agenda, about providing support for agents in a different way. We have already worked with agents to develop, for example, successful webinars (a new webinar on SA returns – expenses, risks and concerns is in production at the moment). We want to build on and enhance these services to improve the quality, speed and convenience of our engagement with agents.
Increased use of digital tools should also provide opportunities for reaching more agents with our key messages and enable us to provide more agents with the support they need.
Does this mean the end of Working Together?
CIPP Policy News Journal
08/04/2015, Page 497 of 521
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