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25 Jun 2009
The outsourcing of debt collection by HM Revenue & Customs demands proper oversight and the publication of standards governing the conduct of contractors undertaking the work, a consumer charity has warned.
Accountancy Age revealed in February that the taxman was to outsource debt collection, but it has emerged that a six month contract has been awarded to iQor, which collect debts in Canada, India and the Phillipines.
Chris Tapp, director of consumer charity group CreditAction, said the absence of transparent guidelines to protect taxpayers in the scope of the contract is a concern.
'Our fear has always been about ensuring there would be oversight with what the agency was doing. There needs to be customer satisfaction work done on behalf of HMRC,’ he said.
It is understood that iQor will receive 25% of every debt settled in payment, further highlighting the need for guidelines to be transparent, according to Tapp. iQor is only permitted to make phone calls and write letters to debtors. ‘We’d be interested to know whether there’s any monitoring in the frequency of phone calls and whether they’re calling at anti-social hours,’ said Tapp.
According to Peter Lockhart, senior officer of the Public and Commercial Services union, 2,000 cases, mostly self assessment debts have already been assumed by iQor.
He said he is expecting internal dialogue over the handling of taxpayers’ data.
HMRC declined to comment.
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Visitor comments Add your comment
Morally reprehensible
It is morally reprehensible, especially in times of recession, that the government is using taxpayers money to provide jobs in overseas countries!
And why such an extortionate rate?
Posted by: Old Greying Accountant, 26 Jun 2009 | 00:00
Debts what debt?
I have a small business client whose end of PAYE year payment was 'lost' by HMRC.
Sunbsequent chases by them and phone calls by us resulted in no more that a a 7 day letter threatening distraint of property / court action which arrived 8 days after it was dated!
Shipley said they had a backlog and had caught up to 1st June (on the 25th!) internal emails and that they were snowed under because of low staffing levels.
A call to the local tax office that would recover the debt got them to at least mark the file with our problems. It seemed that this was a routine problem.
If all this debt is passed out to an external egency, I can see there being serious problems the cause of which is a poorly managed internal reorganisation.
Personally, I think accountants should refuse to deal with these people and our institutes should make this policy. And very public.
Posted by: Daniel Gricks, 26 Jun 2009 | 00:00