About HM Revenue & Customs
You probably know HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) as the people who collect tax, but there’s far more to us than that. We’ve moved beyond our traditional business of assessing and collecting taxes and providing valuation services.
We’re now responsible for National Insurance, making sure the National Minimum Wage is properly paid, paying tax credits and collecting student loans. Our aim is to administer the tax and customs systems fairly and efficiently. We know, for example, that most people and businesses want to do what is right – to pay what they owe and claim only what they are due.
We’re committed to making it as easy as possible for our taxpayers, claimants and other customers to get it right. We will also protect society further by dealing with anyone who intentionally avoids their responsibilities.
We have a turnover of around £450 billion in tax, duty and National Insurance contributions, an annual budget of over £4.5 billion and over 50 million individual and corporate customers. We’re a big and diverse organisation, employing around 80,000 people, many of them in contact centres, customer service and customs roles at ports and airports. Our goal is to continuously improve our customer service, helping our customers meet their obligations and enforcing compliance on those who deliberately avoid their responsibilities.
Like most other big organisations, we employ a lot of specialists like lawyers, accountants, economists, policy advisers and project managers. We’re renowned for our cutting edge diversity policies – and strongly believe in developing and caring for the people who work here, ensuring they have challenging and rewarding work to do.
Local Compliance
Local Compliance (LC) is responsible for operational compliance work across a range of business taxes and duties including Corporation Tax, Employer Compliance, PAYE, VAT, Excise, International Trade and other business taxes.
Approximately 14,500 people work in LC across the country. Together we contribute to the delivery of each of the Departmental strategic objectives which are themselves focused on improving the extent to which individuals and businesses pay the tax due and receive the credits and payments to which they are entitled, improve customers’ experiences of HMRC thereby improving the UK business environment and reducing the risk of elicit import and export of things that might harm the UK’s physical and social wellbeing.
From 1 May 2008, LC activity is based around 3 customer groups and one group consisting of the majority of our Cross Cutting Teams. Senior Tax Planning Specialists recruited into HMRC will work within the Large and Complex customer group. Nationwide, this group looks after around 14,000 businesses with the aim of increasing the “compliant customer” proportion of our population.
Large Business Service
In the forefront of HMRC Integration, the Large Business Service (LBS) was formed in October 2004 from the Inland Revenue Large Business Office, Inland Revenue Energy Group and HM Customs & Excise Large Business Group, with a new strategic framework adopted in April 2006. Key features of the new structure include deployment of LBS resources to manage risk; compliance activities based on sectorisation of the LBS population; and a single Client Relationship Manager (CRM) with responsibility for each business. The long term vision is for the case teams to be co-located across all heads of duty in offices which deal with a small number of business sectors.
Charities, Assets and Residence
Our Charities, Assets and Residence (CAR) unit is made up of several different business areas responsible for the design and, in the most part, operational delivery of a diverse range of products. We employ over 1750 people across teams that cover subjects including, amongst others, Inheritance Tax (IHT), Capital Gains Tax, Charities, Residence, Pensions and Trusts. Our specialists work in a wide variety of roles, including operations and compliance through to technical and policy.
Trade Sector Adviser
The Trade Sector Adviser Team provides an advisory and consultancy service to tax and other specialists within HMRC to increase our understanding of business sectors and better target interventions. The team works with senior managers in HMRC providing a variety of products tailored to specific needs. These can range from an overview of the current business environment in a sector to a detailed analysis of a specific business or an aspect of that business. Other type of work could include helping colleagues in HMRC or other government departments analyse the yield from a particular tax or duty or develop better targeted policy.
