HMRC reorganisation - policy & strategy split from operations

8 Sept 2016

HMRC yesterday announced plans for a major reorganisation, with current directors-general being assigned new responsibilities

This blog post rounds up the announcement and what the CIOT has said so far in response.

Text of HMRC’s email to stakeholders

HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has announced the next stage of our Building Our Future transformation to our staff today, with some restructuring of our high-level organisation.

As you know, HMRC is transforming into a smaller, more highly-skilled operation, based in fewer locations and offering modern, digital services to customers.

As we have been evolving what we do, and where we do it, as part of this transformation, we have also kept our organisational structure under review, to ensure that it is fit for the future and that it supports our new digital and collaborative ways of working. As a result, we have now decided to make some further changes to how we are structured. From October, we will be reorganising the Directorates in our four existing lines of business into three new groups:

  • a new Customer Strategy and Tax Design group, which brings together our customer strategy, tax policy, process design and tax assurance teams, led by Jim Harra
  • an expanded Customer Service group, which includes all of our big operational teams, led by Ruth Owen
  • a Customer Compliance group, which will tackle non-compliance and enforcement for all customer groups, including large businesses, led by Jennie Granger.
    The three new groups will be supported by the existing Transformation and Corporate Services areas.

The reorganisation builds on other structural changes that we have made over the past couple of years and it will support us to put a greater focus on customers, to change how we provide our services to help people get their taxes right and how we target our response to those who deliberately seek to cheat the system.

CIOT response

In response to a request from Accountancy Magazine for comment, John Cullinane, Tax Policy Director at the CIOT, said:

“We hope that this is HMRC taking a more integrated approach to its policy decisions and achieving its policy goals. We look forward to seeing if the changes lead to a greater role for HMRC in policy development.

“It would be interesting to know to what extent this is a result of the two major challenges facing HMRC at the moment - Making Tax Digital and Brexit.”

By George Crozier, CIOT Head of External Relations.