International Trade

Watch It! Here Comes The Mammoth

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...summer, various feasibility studies were undertaken and the ICM option has been selected. Apparently, such a system will allow HMR&C to pool all the information it holds on taxpayers (or are we ‘customers’?) in one place, creating a single taxpayer ‘account’.

The plan is that HMR&C can access and update this at any time and taxpayers can view their liabilities and entitlements. There are only 29.5m taxpayers in Britain so it shouldn’t take too long to get this ICM up and running! After all, with an increasing percentage of the population leaving each year, the number of taxpayers will be reducing rapidly.

In an article I read in one business journal this project was described as ‘a mammoth exercise’. I am sure you will not miss the irony of this – the mammoth has been extinct for quite some time!

I understand that this ICM project was once upon a time called ‘Whole Customer View’ and I think the immediate past chairman (Sir David Varney) made a number of references to it in his plans for the future.

The‘Whole CustomerView’was about prioritising business taxpayers and had three main goals:

1. a single customer record (VAT number?)
2. the ability to improve contact with taxpayers
3. the creation of a ‘single picture’ of a taxpayer’s financial position, with the aim of permitting ‘more effective dealings’.

An HMR&C spokesman reportedly said of ICM, ‘This work offers some exciting opportunities to enhance the way that HMR&C delivers services to its customers. That should deliver significant benefits for customers, avoiding the need for them to contact HMR&C several times. It is, of course, a very large and potentially complex agenda and so it is important that we take the time to get these initial stages of the work right.’

All is not lost though... continued on page four >

 

 

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