Weekly Tax Update - 30 January 2017

1.GENERAL

1.1 ICAEW survey of smaller agents' views of HMRC service standards

The ICAEW 2016 research survey, involving 350 interviews with smaller agents who interact with HMRC services at least once a month, has found little change to the quality of HMRC's service standards over the past year. This is despite HMRC's own statistics showing steady improvement for the general public.

The survey found a disappointing lack of improvement in HMRC's service standards over the year with 80% of agents reporting no improvement and 32% reporting a deterioration. The ICAEW set out six recommendations for improvement:

• digital services available to taxpayers must also be available to agents;