Research commissioned by HMRC into how they are viewed by major taxpayers was published last month. The overall result – pretty good but could try harder.

The research, conducted by a professional market research organization, seems to have focused on three categories of business taxpayer:

1. Large Business Service taxpayers
2. Large and Complex taxpayers that have been allocated a Customer Relationship Manager
3. Taxpayers that do not have a Customer Relationship Manager

A significant proportion (up to 86%) of each group as surveyed rate the overall service received from HMRC in the past year as very or fairly good. It seems that as far as quality service is concerned, the bigger you are the better; an approach which by and large mirrors the private sector reality.

Areas where it was felt matters could be improved were identified as:

• Speed of response
• Information and consistency of response between different parts of HMRC, and HMRC treating businesses as joined up organisations.
• Transparency of decision making
• Ease of access to information
• The need to better understand the businesses

These have a familiar ring. They coincide almost precisely with recommendations in the 2007 OECD Tax Intermediaries Report on how Revenue Authorities should interact better with taxpayers.

The full (and very difficult) report is available at http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/research/lbcs-full-report.pdf.