Politicalog

MARCH 27TH, 2006
By POLITICALOG

Sympathy for the Devil

We all hold a special place in our hearts for Inland Revenue employees. Usually the same place we reserve for Traffic Wardens. However, for the moment, I would ask you to suspend your prejudices while I present a “view from inside HMRC” passed onto me last week.

“Tax Needn’t be Taxing” we are told… Unless, that is, you are one of the unfortunate “units” working at the coalface of Gordon Brown’s taxation policies. “Units”, allegedly is HMRC Management terminology for “Employees”.

The poor sods working at the processing centre in Lothian have the unenviable task of dealing with a backlog of 23 million (unconfirmed) outstanding open cases as well as the mountains of work that Gordo’s Tax Credit system has introduced.

David Varney, the recently installed head of HMRC, tasked with overseeing a cut of 12500 units has introduced a system called LEAN. LEAN is essentially a statistical whip that has introduced a corporate bullying culture to HMRC. Staff progress is held up for all to see at oppressive, often hourly, team meetings where new, impossible targets are set.

Unsurprisingly, staff are leaving in droves while many departments have a ban on recruitment. The resulting understaffing is described as “horrific”.

It was described to me as a “sweatshop environment” and a “Victorian style workhouse”.

In short, the Tax Man is pissed.

You see, David Varney introduced LEAN without consultation. The Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) who represent the “units” is not amused. They have raised a dispute with Varney over the introduction of LEAN and are gearing up a campaign that may well lead to strike action. They reckon that Varney is not delivering value for taxpayer’s money and he is alienating the only people in the civil service who actually do all the work.

There is a delicious irony to this when you consider that civil servants are being treated this badly by a Labour administration.

The documentation for Gordo’s last budget ran to over 1000 pages. The man cannot help himself. Simplification of the tax system should be the Conservatives first goal when they get into office. I fear however that unpicking the birds nest of Brown’s policies will be an impossible task. It would be easier to throw the whole lot away and start again.

So please spare a thought for the Tax Man. It’s a dirty job which is getting dirtier all the time Gordon has fiscal control… but some poor “unit” has got to do it.

New Labour Spin, Politics, Taxation

14 Comments

By David Vance, March 27, 2006 @ 9:17 pm

A fair point – but how on earth can such an obsessive micro-manager like Brown
ever be an effective PM ?
By Politicalog, March 27, 2006 @ 11:19 pm

He won’t, but I suspect he will fool enough people before they all find out it is too late.
By xoggoth, April 30, 2006 @ 9:11 pm

I have a place in mind for them. Not in my heart though. A lot colder and about six feet down.
By a HMRC MANAGER, January 16, 2007 @ 8:12 pm

Whilst I have gone through the LEAN principles as a manager it was a total strange change concept at first. Whilst I currently work in a processing office and my desk is ‘taped’ generally it is not that bad!

However……. the problem being with HMRC is that many people have had the same desk for years. This has obviously built up a series of plants, photos, toys, and other non work junk which could stop people from working effciently. Nowadays with hot desking (sharing work space with evening colleagues who work till 9pm). The idea of a clear workspace makes it easier (theoretically) to work quicker – I agree this does happen!

NOW comes the point I dont agree with -Ive worked through the New Tax Credits fiasco (and it was a shambles from start to finish! No higher managers would listen at all to those staff on the shop floor!) Through LEAN has come the movements of targets which has become VERY stressful – I am required now to MAKE my staff work 35% harder with the output of figures than 3 months ago! I am now working and estimated 2.5 hours longer every day and I now have more paperwork and pathetic useless statistics that go nowhere – We have gone back to recording the majority of figures on paper instead of electronic items – its just a joke – New Labour, New shambles!!

PS – David Varney has left and left his mess to Paul Gray!
By a unit, February 27, 2007 @ 11:59 pm

i would insist any taxpayer having difficulties with HMRC should complain in wrtitng because self assesment forms are being piled in storerooms without being recorded as received against the taxpayers records.
By Another Unit, April 28, 2007 @ 7:31 pm

I work for the TCO. What a nightmarish shambles! The computer system (that the politicians insisted upon bring in 18 months before it was ready) has been a joke since they bought it in back in 2003. It’s never worked properly and the way it’s designed ACTUALLY LEADS to OVERPAYMENTS. This computer system has to be shut down at least twice a year so the can install further corrections to it which usually lead to more problems that they did not forsee. Guess what they don’t back it up. So all new introduce problems have to be “worked around”.
Moral is at an all time low with in my office with people getting more and more stressed. We’ve just had a “15% stretch” (stretch = productivety increase) introduce without consulting PCS (of course) with a system that’s glyches meant we couldn’t always hit our target’s anyway.
Manager’s atitudes vary from “i can’t do anything about it, it’s policy” to “if you don’t like it you know where the door is”.
I hope Gordo comes to visit our office as we’ll all be trying to say hello knives in hand!
By Ali Myers-Ward, June 6, 2007 @ 7:50 am

I couldn’t agree more with these comments from an HMRC manager and ‘another unit’. Huge workload pressures, an unnecessarily complicated system, low staff morale and lack of HMRC accountability (the onus being on claimants to spot all mistakes and continually report them until corrected, if they wish to avoid recoverable overpayments) is not a recipe for a reliable, fair, safe system.

If you’ve been affected by the Tax Credit Fiasco as a claimant or a sympathetic HMRC employee (or both, as commonly happens amongst lower-paid HMRC employees), please visit http://www.taxcreditoverpayment.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk for peer support.
By paul, September 10, 2007 @ 3:18 pm

I did hear that the David Varney of HMRC referred to earlier got a Â£1m bonus for handling to MHRC/IR merger
By Lean sweat shop worker, October 14, 2007 @ 1:30 pm

A picture was published in the HMRc mag a while back which showed ”the perfect lean enviroment” at a toyota factory there was not one human in the pic all work was being done by robots which is pretty much what lean wants to turn us humanoids into !! our managers no longer have time to sit with staff and train/consolidate new working practices (which change almost daily)as they are constantly taking ”production figures” hourly in our case and then updating whiteboards with meaningless stats, by the time they’ve done this it’s time to start again. we have senior managers on a salary we can only dream of coming from all over the country to make sure our desks are tidy !!! and if we have any I.T problems we have to phone a privately run help desk who get paid an exhorbitant sum for every phone call and when as usually happens they can’t solve the problem it’s passed to the guys in our local office who we used to phone direct and they fix the prob. The Standard Working Instructions we have for proccesing are a joke we have ”problem solving meetings” to rectify these which takes months to pass this”efficient” system and the solution is usually to go back to the way we used to do it before the introduction of lean. our post on hand figures are worse now than BL (before lean) but sickness abscence has gone down but only because people come into work when they really should be at home in bed because of the new way in which abscences are managed they’re scared to take time off incase they lose their job this means illesses are spread to other staff who in turn still come in perpetuating a climate of coughing sneezing and totally demoralised staff but according to those upon high this is a great benifit of the lean system which is a great success so that must be why over 90% of staff involved in lean voted to take industrial action ??
By Dirty Harry, November 11, 2007 @ 12:52 am

PCS our trade union has recently recommended an offer on lean which does not go far enough to alay the staffs fears. Indeed most of the offers by the Dept. will only be discussed after any yes vote is achieved. LEAN fails to take into account that everyone is different. It fails to take into account peoples individuality, experience and medical problems/needs such as RSI. At a recent meeting we were told that the dept(ex-com) would look to withdraw flexi time arrangements and not speak to the union on future big issues such as the up and coming replacement for cop (the PAYE system) unless there was a yes vote thus trying to blackmail both PCS (who seem to have fallen for it) and the staff who hopefully have not. The real truth about LEAN is that millions of pounds have been spent on a system that does not and connot work. It has failed to deliver the efficiency savings promissed by Unipart.We simply do not have enough staff to deal with the work load irrespective of what work method you want to call it.. LEAN has deskilled Inland Revenue staff and made their jobs boring. From dealing with all aspects of work i.e. phone calls, post open cases and tax returns, to now dealing with only one aspect of this work. On tax returns, We have been set targets both on quality and quantity that are unachievable, These targets were based on figures taken useing tax returns that were hand picked for their simplicity and before other time consuming methods were introduced to the process. Several timings have been done on tax returns since the original timings, that the targets are based on. The latest timings which were taken on a team of staff on a daily basis for a week only for these figures to be “lost”. The LEAN consultant who took the figures was in the territorial army and was recently posted to IRAQ. Did she take these figures with her? Technical guidance and systems such as the system we use for issueing a code to a customer are changed somtimes on a weekly basis and it is difficult to take in all the technical and changing information. This guidance is often prepared by staff who have not worked in the process and somtimes have little or no knowledge of it. Quality and quantity figures are collected on an hourly basis and put on a white board. You have to indicate each hour as to why/if you have failed to meet the hourly target. Daily meetings take place around these white boards which you have to attend and stand up straight no slouching or sitting down as this is frowned upon be senior managers. Managers manipulate the system to show that LEAN is working because of fear of what senior management will say/do or for the fact that they are looking to gain promotion to escape the brutality of LEAN. Staff like me at the AA and AO Grades have been and continue to be treated like naughty school children who do not want to come to work and when they do, do not want to do any work. This is far from the truth hard working underpaid staff, when compared to say accountants have kept the Dept. afloat for years through major upheaval and change. Staff with any comments contradicting the LEAN doctorine are diliberatly kept away from speaking to people who visit the office. Returns can be failed by quality managers for minor things such as mispelling an employers name and for things that do not affect a persons tax bill. So a whole return can fail because lets say out of 18 aspects a quality manager checks only one thing may be wrong and this may not have any tax consequences or anything that a taxpayer…sorry customer may recieve….So the whole tax return fails. There is also inconsistancy in quality managers and what they fail staff and therefore the return on. When you get someting wrong you are told in front of the rest of your team this has the effect of demotivating staff and is in my opinion a form of bullying. We have managers on Â£30k plus coming along and checking on whether your desk complies the dept 5 s’s ie pens rulers etc all have to be in a certain place. The same manages own desks quite often would fail their own checks but of course they do not check thier own desks. Only one photo is allowed and this must be taken off your desk when you leave the office unless you are a senior grade of course. They also tell you off for having your coat on the back of your chair. The sad part about it for many of us satff at grades AA and AO is that these are the same managers who have consistantly failed to deliver the results whatever system has been in place over the years. surely the private sector would have sacked these people years ago. We are encouraged to participate in suggesting ways of improving the LEAN process. But this is controlled and you can only discuss things that can be solved i.e. if you suggest improvements to the IT system or suggest that you have been deskilled or that the job is boring you are met with the response from senior management that “there is nothing we can do about that” Next week we are putting more people on processing returns than is allowed in the standard solution ( the LEAN bible). We are told that this is to meet customer need. In recent years other departments have helped out but they are doing other jobs other than their own so are unable to help. The LEAN open case team are not dealing with open cases potentially delaying the issue of both repayments of tax and notification of underpaid tax. Instead they are dealing with post coming in from customers not only from our office but from other offices who all under LEAN are in a mess. So LEAN is working if you are a senior manager or a memmber of excom or the Government..But this is far from the truth and continues to be covered up. Staff are stressed and forced to work in a system that does not work and are slapped down if they speak out. Experienced staff are leaving in their hundreds each month because of LEAN which is of course a big part of what the Dept/Govt wants. What price to both the taxpayer and the country. After all HMRC is now run by a majority of people (ex-com)who have come from outside big business and have no concept or knowledge of how the tax and customs system works. If you can run a parks dept. or mobile phone company you can run HMRC.. cna’t you???? if you don’t believe me have a look at the make up of ex-com which is available on the internet. I suspect having failed in thier roles in HMRC or not depending on your views. in the future a lot of these people will return to the private sector to reap the benefits sowed in the favour of big business whilst overseeing HMRC.
By FRIEND OF A FRIEND, November 24, 2007 @ 12:20 am

Absolutely correct, Dirty Harry. It is an absolute bloody disgrace. Many of these so called “Managers” came through promotion systems that completely ignored knowledge and experience, and simply selected, indeed searched for “I I I , ME ME ME people. Quite often they know nothing at all about the job, but monitor and “manage” the work and people who do with no shame whatsoever. God forgive them, really. It is impossible to imagine what is going on.