International Trade

Watch It! Here Comes The Mammoth

February 2007
Mike Hodge, International Trade Today

I don’t know whether you want the good news or the bad news. Once upon a time, there was a genuine choice as to one’s preferred option but, as 2007 gets underway, there is, in reality, only bad news. And, if you read to the end of this article (I don’t blame you at all if you give up half-way through), you will find that the news is not just bad – it is terrible.

Let me throw another acronym at you – ICM, which stands for Integrated Customer Management system and it is the next hairbrained scheme that several hundred HM Revenue & Customs staff are working on. And that excludes the hundreds of external management consultants who are riding ‘shotgun’.

Imagine the scene – HM Revenue & Customs has just spent several billion pounds on an IT system to capture all the information it requires about taxpayers and to access and update the data. The system actually works. So, pleased by the result, officials interview a‘customer’for feedback via ‘interactive TV’. Here is the response the Revenue hopes to get.

Taxpayer: I remember when – not so long ago – most people were scared of the tax people. Getting anything through the letterbox made you anxious and sometimes angry because you didn’t understand. You would put off doing the forms. You felt that Revenue & Customs was full of clever, rather unapproachable, people – although when you did contact them they were actually pretty helpful.

But it wasn’t easy to find out what you had to do or who you should contact if you wanted to ask something. That has all changed. Now people don’t think twice about contacting them – unless they are wanting to... continued on page two >

 

 

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