The latest update from HMRC is set out below.

“Agent Forum (AF)

As at the end of April 2020 the Forum had over 888 (up 115) on March registered Agent subscribers, of 1,229 users signed up to its predecessor forum. The Agent Forum re-platforming has been live for eight months now and even though registrations have not reached the levels of its former platform, participation and issues traffic are increasing. Thus far during 20/21, we have dealt with over 50 widespread issues, across all Heads of Duty. The new ‘Knowledge Base’ feature is also increasingly popular and carries announcements and real time taxes information. We continue to support agents and their clients through the COVID-19 crisis, and have established a dedicated panel to deal with related issues and published guidance for all associated schemes including the Self-Employed Income Support Scheme (SEISS) and Job Retention Scheme (JRS). We have in conjunction with our Issues Overview Group (IOG) stakeholder colleagues, developed procedures to identify high priority widespread issues to be taken forward for resolution with our internal technical specialist and communications partners. This will be being implemented on the Agent Forum going into this year. We continue building our internal HMRC Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) capability, formalising recruitment from across HMRC to improve the quality and timeliness of issue resolution responses and to focus on Agent Forum operations. Performance metrics carried forward from the previous platforms now include over 1,800k views, 9,000 posted messages on over 1,650 current topics, all since July 2017; which are moderated daily with appropriate responses given, as determined by subject matter, related traffic generated, and referrals provided by line of business. For 20/21, we are reviewing what performance metrics are reported in future, as we better understand new functionality provided by the MS Dynamics platform.

The Digital Customer Support Services (DCSS) Agent Team is staffed by a Service Manager and 2.5 FTE Moderators, who moderate and run the forum.”

END OF HMRC UPDATE