Small rant about Revenue

This is probably not the appropriate place (Mods feel free to move me!) to discuss but I was wondering what people's general opinion on organisation at the revenue is?

In the first place, it has taken me 24 months of emails/letters and phone calls - plus the attentions of my accountant - to sort out a simple matter on deposit interest. I owed them money but do you think I could get the right figure out of them - I had nine notices of assessment in total.

However, today I wanted to do two things: ask advice on the VAT RTD form and to confirm payment of my tax. In total it has taken over an hour and I have spoken to seven people. Between phone messages which state "The person at extension XXX is not available and is not accepting phone messages", lines that go dead after being on hold for ages and operators that for some reason put you through to tax and customs (that particular guy was as confused as I was but at least he was polite), I'm speechless.

Add to that the fact that emails from any revenue.ie address I tried bounced back and, at one stage, the operator answered the phone with 'Whha? Whatcha want?'.

Plenty of people in the revenue seem like very nice people but why is it a Herculean task to find the one person who seems to understand what you're talking about?

The frontline staff are "trained on the job" and only the front line staff will take calls from the great unwashed.

Is the name of your Tax Inspector not included on correspondence that you receive from Revenue? You should ring them with all your queries and they will then track down the correct answer for you.

In general, the Revenue is very well organised.

Revenue Online is particularly good and a model for online systems generally.

I got an appallingly rude person answering the phone, who refused to give me her name and refused to put me through to her supervisor.

I read the Customer Charter and made a formal complaint. Not sure to whom.

They did ring back and explained that the phones were answered by a call centre(run by eircom?) and apologised for her rudeness. They got the right person to contact me and resolve the problem.

So it's a huge organisation which runs very well generally. But it's dependent on people and they are sometimes unreliable and unpredictable.

Brendan

A bit of a PC reply there Brendan. I feel that what you are saying prevails throughout the 'Civil' Service. Users of the Revenue services are customers and should be treated as such by the people that work for these organisations. The standards adopted by some are brilliant but these are then being let down by the others who dont seem to care and are not accountable for their behaviour. Any systems whereby people have jobs for life are suspect. We have a right to expect high standards.

simplyjoe said:

A bit of a PC reply there Brendan. .

Click to expand...

I have absolutely no idea what you mean by that comment.

My rant,

I use a professional accounts management company to deal with all my tax issues, accounts and returns, they do it all online.

However I get 2 or 3 brown revenue envelops monthly, and they get duplicates of same. VAT assessments, P35, receipts for PRSI, receipts for PAYE etc etc etc.

My a/c manager in the management company told me they have 100's of clients who get the same.

500(clients approx)x3 ( letters per month)x12 ( months)x2 (me and them) 36000 letters when its all online anyway!!!

Where you file online through an agent the agent ets their copies online through their inbox, however the client still gets hard copies of all returns, assessments and receipts.

Agreed - they don't need to send out receipts. No one does much anymore.

But if they did not send out notices of assessment, people might claim that they had not been notified.