According to accountancy firm UHY Hacker Young, a total of 1,697 staff resigned from HMRC in 2012 to 2013 – the highest number since the 2008 to 2009.
This year’s figure is also up slightly from the 1,629 who left the UK government’s tax and customs department in 2011 to 2012.
Roy Maugham, tax partner at UHY Hacker Young said that the Coalition’s pressure on HMRC to clamp down on tax evasion and the stinging criticism that it has received over of its performance – from cross-party bodies such as the Public Accounts Committee and in some quarters of the media – appeared to be taking its toll on staff morale.
Maugham also warned that the increased focus on evasion may soon be felt at the expense of HMRC’s customer service duties. “HMRC is now under so much pressure to target tax evasion and avoidance that it has been forced to shift more of its budget towards dealing with enforcement, and so it has less capacity to deal with run-of-the-mill enquiries from customers,” he said.
Staff resignations hit hard at the very top of HMRC, with nine senior civil servants quitting this year – the highest number for five years.
The greatest losses were in Personal Tax which had 1,238 resignations.
The Benefits and Credits department – which is undergoing a period of radical change with the roll out of Universal Credit this year – also saw a massive increase in staff quitting, with more than treble the number of resignations compared to the previous year (138 in 2012 to 2013 versus 40 in 2011 to 2012).
Roy Maugham said that the loss of nine senior civil servants in one year was “a real blow to the stability and consistency of HMRC’s leadership.”
He added: “The high number of recent losses at the top also seems to be having a knock-on effect lower down the scale.”
The statistics follow HMRC officials’ heaviest grilling yet from the cross-party public accounts committee Chair Margaret Hodge. Last week’s session saw tax assurance commissioner Edward Troup, director general business tax Jim Harra and director general of enforcement and compliance Jennie Granger all have to justify their performance.
During the session it was revealed that the Swiss-UK tax agreement will not yield the £3.12bn windfall expected this financial year. HMRC admitted it had raised £440m so far this year and £782m in total, and said the forecasts had been “inaccurate”. This was in part due to the Swiss banks’ culture of secrecy, Troup added, and while on a visit to Switzerland, HMRC conveyed its concern about the amounts they were receiving to the Swiss representatives.
So far, 18,000 names have been given to HMRC by the Swiss authorities and letters have been sent to 9,000 of those, Troup told MPs.
But HMRC had no "hard information" about the true amount of money held in the accounts.
