Inland Revenue Staff Walk Out Amid Tax Credit Chaos

by Robert Lee, Tax-News.com, London

27 May 2003

Staff at several Inland Revenue offices across England and Scotland staged a walk out last week in protest at the unbearable working conditions they say they have been subjected to resulting from the chaos surrounding the government's new tax credit system.

Last week, 140 staff walked out at the Revenue's administrative centre in East Kilbride, whilst simultaneous protests were held in Edinburgh, Manchester and Sunderland.

The introduction of the new tax credits has been dogged by delays and errors, with some families forced to wait months for a payment. As a result, frontline staff are having to deal with increasing numbers of irate members of the public, and they claim their workload has doubled in recent weeks. According to the Union representing the IR staff, the Public and Commercial Services Union, tax offices received around 9 million telephone calls on one day alone, forcing the Revenue to shut down the system.

The IR has conceded that "isolated unofficial industrial action" took place last week, but maintained the impact was minimal and not significant. "We are seeing caller numbers coming down slowly day by day, though the helpline remains extremely busy and we recognise the real pressure that people dealing at first hand with our customers are under," a Revenue spokesman said in a Guardian report.

The delays in tax credit processing have been largely attributed to the shortcomings of a £2.8 billion computer system. In a recent statement, the IR claimed to be "working to make the computer system perform faster, and more reliably".

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