A £1.2m overpayment involving some 134 members of staff last year has been admitted by HMRC.
The error confirmed by a spokesperson for HMRC, went on to say that most of the overpaid salaries had been repaid during the last financial year.
“We take recovery of any overpaid salaries extremely seriously. The percentage overpaid is around 0.5% of our total salary costs,” the spokesperson said.
“We are continuously seeking to improve the accuracy of our payment and over the last five years the amount overpaid to employees has reduced over 20%”, the spokesperson added.
Dia Chakravarty, political director, at the TaxPayers' Alliance, commented, "Hard-pressed families will be furious that HMRC has been overpaying its employees by mistake at their expense.
“HMRC has a terrible track record, ranging from unanswered telephone calls to repeatedly getting people's tax code wrong. It's vital that HMRC makes drastic and rapid improvements to its services, so that taxpayers can be sure that the organisation is being run efficiently," she added.
When the chief executive Lin Homer gave evidence to the Public Accounts Committee earlier last month she argued that HMRC had been getting “better and better” following the first three months of 2015 whereby the number of calls answered were so bad that she had to issue a public apology.
Comment
We are all too aware of the constant criticism HMRC receive over their poor service standards, this is compounded by a report revealing that the wait for people to get their calls answered was 47 minutes. In some research undertaken by ICAEW they found that 90% of their tax faculty members thought that service standard either stayed at the same poor low level or got worse throughout 2015. The research pointed to two areas that were considered in need of much improvement, they are call waiting times and the knowledge of the staff answering those calls.
And, a parting thought, £1.2million over 134 employees is an average overpayment of £8,955, now that is some overpayment.
Original article by Sinead Moore for economia
