HMRC promises personal online tax accounts in new digital strategy

HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) has launched a digital strategy that will see the creation of personalised online tax accounts for taxpayers and businesses in the next four years.

The plan is HMRC’s contribution to the wider Whitehall drive towards “government as a platform”, which was today endorsed by the head of the civil service, Sir Jeremy Heywood.

HMRC’s digital strategy, published on the Gov.UK website today, describes a roadmap for developing digital services to improve how taxpayers and businesses engage with the department. While few of the items listed have specific milestones or deadlines, the strategy outlines the key elements expected to be put in place by 2018.

Central to this are personalised digital tax accounts, based on a “multi-channel digital tax platform”. Personal tax accounts will allow users to “file, pay and make changes across all of their taxes, in a single place” based on real-time data. 

For example, taxpayers will be able to log in and see tax statements, details about tax codes, file tax returns and make payments online. It will also have a secure personal mailbox facility to allow HMRC to communicate electronically with taxpayers.

Individual tax accounts such as this have not been possible in the past because of the siloed nature of HMRC’s systems – in many cases, IT systems were built around particular taxes, such as PAYE or national insurance, rather than the individual taxpayer.

“All of our customers and the businesses we serve will have access to a personalised online tax account. They’ll be able to file, pay and make changes across all of their taxes, in a single place. Customers will increasingly be able to get what they need from us online,” said the HMRC strategy document published online.

“We will use the data and intelligence we have about our customers to present the personalised service. They will feel that we have a really good understanding of what is going on in their lives. When they deal with us it will be as though we are picking up a conversation where they left off – rather than starting all over again.”

To enable personal online services, work is underway on a multi-channel tax platform including the sort of customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities commonly used by banks and retailers to offer co-ordinated services to customers across several channels.

“We are building a new digital platform with a common infrastructure that links existing and new systems,” said the HMRC strategy document.

“This means we will be more consistent and responsive in the way we provide our services. The platform will be secure, reliable, flexible and scalable, allowing us to develop services quickly. We will be able to manage customer contact flexibly through a range of communication channels including phone, secure messaging and webchat.”

Neither of these new digital services has a specific deadline published for implementation, but the strategy document said it expects to see “active relationships develop with customers through digital tax accounts and assisted digital services”, during 2014 or 2015, along with the “first wave of digital services for individuals and businesses designed to help customers pay the right tax at the right time”.

The document said that by 2018 “dealing with HMRC through personalised, multi-channel digital services [will be] the norm for the majority of customers”.

The strategy said that the move to digital services requires new skills in the department, and a new “culture and mindset” involving “an increasing number of cross-functional service delivery teams”.

“Every customer in the UK will have their own personalised digital tax account, so we can help make it simpler, quicker and easier to pay the right tax at the right time. This will have big implications for our staff, as well as our customers, involving changes to the types of job we will be doing and the skills we will need,” said HMRC.

One of the key dependencies is developing in-house digital development skills – an area HMRC admits is currently limited. The department started a recruitment programme in January to find 50 staff for a new digital centre in Newcastle. The centre was formally opened in late July but HMRC is still advertising for a number of roles.

Most of HMRC’s IT is currently provided under one of Whitehall’s biggest outsourcing deals – the £800m-per-year Aspire contract, with a consortium led by Capgemini with Fujitsu as a key partner. 

In July, the National Audit Office (NAO) warned the department that it was taking too long to prepare for the end of the Aspire contract in June 2017. The NAO pointed to serious risks to HMRC’s business if it fails to replace the deal in line with government reforms that mandate moving away from large IT outsourcing arrangements.

Every year HMRC issues 245 million paper forms, sends 200 million outbound letters, receives 73 million customer support phone calls and 70 million items of post. The digital strategy aims to change the mix of interactions to be predominantly digital by 2018.

But the strategy also includes provision for “assisted digital” services for people who are unable or unwilling to transact with HMRC online.

“We know that not everyone is ready or able to use digital services. People have a range of needs so, for example, we’ll need to provide extra support and encouragement for those who need a bit of help, right through to offering different ways for people to get their information into our digital services for those who really can’t do it alone,” said the strategy.

Sir Jeremy Heywood, the head of the civil service, wrote in a blog post on Gov.UK this week that he sees “government as a platform” and digital services as a key driver of change in Whitehall.

“Things are changing in the civil service. The changes might be hard to see from outside – you won’t have heard about them on the news – but they are happening,” he said.

“Technology and the internet in particular, are the driving forces. Many in the world of business understood this and adapted to it years ago. The civil service lagged behind. Now we are changing that.”

The HMRC digital strategy is being led by Mark Dearnley, the former CIO of Vodafone, who joined as the organisation’s new chief digital and information officer in October last year.

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Civil service chief endorses 'government as platform' digital strategy

The head of the civil service, Jeremy Heywood, has endorsed the government digital strategy, hailing the move to “government as a platform” as a key part of Whitehall reform.

Writing in a blog post, Heywood said the pace of digital change in the civil service is accelerating.

“Things are changing in the civil service. The changes might be hard to see from outside – you won’t have heard about them on the news – but they are happening,” he said.

“Technology and the internet in particular, are the driving forces. Many in the world of business understood this and adapted to it years ago. The civil service lagged behind. Now we are changing that.”

Heywood discussed a number of elements of the government digital strategy, such as the Gov.UK web publishing platform and work to digitise 25 high-volume government transactions.

He revealed that HP CEO Meg Whitman and her team met with some of Whitehall’s digital leaders and permanent secretaries last week. HP remains the biggest IT supplier to the UK government by revenue, earning about £1.7bn per year – but moves to end big outsourcing deals and bring in smaller and more agile suppliers have threatened HP's dominance.  

“The discussion indicated just how significant this agenda is and also – in my view – the good progress we have already made,” said Heywood.

Heywood said the move to “government as a platform” was intended to change Whitehall from “a series of disjointed silos” to “a more unified, efficient service” – echoing closely the words of government digital chief Mike Bracken. In a recent interview with Computer Weekly, Bracken described the move from silos to platforms as a “generational” switch: “That is going to be the bulk of the activity technically in the next parliament,” he said.

Heywood acknowledged the role of the Government Digital Service (GDS), which Bracken leads, and said the digital principles GDS has established need to be applied to policy making, and not just to technology.

“I believe that, thanks to the excellent work of the Government Digital Service and the increasing digital capability within each individual department, the British civil service is already at the cutting edge of applying digital technology to public service delivery. But we now need to take this to the next level, and apply the same principles and techniques in policy design,” he said.

“A huge amount of work has been done already, but we have just scratched the surface of what’s possible. New services will emerge – bespoke, personalised services government couldn’t normally justify spending money on, especially in a tight budgetary environment or services no-one else has even thought of before.”

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The digital CIO: Motivate the elephant

One of the permanent features of CIOs' and other IT leaders’ lives is change – how to implement, manage and deliver it.

In my experience, there is a deeply held prejudice among senior business leaders that IT departments block change.

The truth, I feel, is quite otherwise. IT people consider change to be an integral aspect of working with technology. It’s something they actually love and are comfortable with.

What they are less comfortable with is implementing change in a disorderly way, sorting through messy emotional issues, dealing with conflicting and often seemingly illogical beliefs held by business leaders, stakeholders, suppliers, customers and even their own people.

Sadly, that’s what the real world is like. Which is why, as a coach, I find it useful to have a model for change that is more sophisticated than just "make a better business case".

Graduating from Trinity College Cambridge with a degree in English, James Caplin (pictured) wrote professionally for two decades, specialising in corporate videos. 

In 2002 he discovered coaching and, with his wife, moved into a house in a run-down area of West London, which prompted him to become a community activist. 

Now head of coaching at CIO Development, Caplin leads workshops on communication and transformation. 

He serves on several company and charitable boards, and in 2012 was awarded a British Empire Medal for services to his area, now known as Notting Hill.

I have found the model described in Chip and Dan Heath’s book Switch is highly effective for IT leaders. It is particularly appropriate for driving change where you do not have the direct power to mandate it or the resources to pay for it.

That is the business reality for IT professionals. The IT leader may have a budget to implement change, but that won’t buy the co-operation of everyone affected by the proposed change. The CIO can set the course for their own department, but that won’t ensure everyone co-operates.

Imagine your organisation is an elephant – large, unwieldy and easily spooked. 

Your job, as the person driving this change, is to get the elephant – and its rider (the guy sitting on the elephant) – moving in the direction you want it to go.

This image is, for many IT leaders, familiar. They are constantly urging clients, bosses, stakeholders, colleagues, reports, suppliers, users and others to do things – and constantly encountering resistance.

Many IT leaders I work with have an engineering or a similar scientific background – or, at least, a scientific approach. They believe in logic. They also seem to have a deep-seated (and quite touching) belief that logic can change minds.

As historians and lawyers know, people don’t work that way. Belief is deeper than logic. Logic is just an effective and flexible tool. To change minds, to motivate people, you have to work at the belief level.

The example that follows might help illustrate how this works in practice. I recently coached an IT leader who was tasked with leading the roll-out of SAP across multiple European business units.

In its relatively early stages, the project hit a typical real-world problem. The IT leader planned to bring an in-house expert from one country – let’s call it Boduria – who had successfully led the implementation there, to work with a neighbouring country – let’s call it Syldavia – on the implementation.

Unfortunately, the Bodurian business leaders were firmly against the plan. Bodurians had never liked Syldavians. To make matters worse, a Bodurian IT consultant had promised them the earth in an earlier project – and then spectacularly failed to deliver.

My client had tried to convince the Bodurian leaders with logic, but that had not shifted the situation. He had considered rolling over and simply agreeing with the Bodurians, but he knew in his heart of hearts that the project was going to be much more difficult without the expert. He felt stuck.

How could he motivate the elephant? I took the IT leader through the three key principles of the "motivating the elephant" thought process – find the feeling, shrink the change, grow your people – asking a series of focused questions:

Find the feeling

Q. What might change the feelings of the Bodurian leadership?

The IT leader quickly came up with a number of suggestions:

Organise a workshop led by the Syldavian expert as she was very persuasive in person.Invite the Bodurian business leadership to get involved in designing the way the Syldavian expert was introduced.Invite her to work for a day a week initially, win the Bodurian IT department’s trust, then increase that to a couple of days a week and – only after that, if by that time the Bodurian business more widely felt comfortable with her – would she start working permanently in Boduria.

Shrink the change

Q. What is the smallest next practical step you could take to move the project forward ?

It would be useful to invite Bodurian leaders to visit Syldavia, meet the business’s leaders there, and hear from trusted third parties how effective this expert was and how easy to work with.

Q. Who should be invited ?

It would pay to get a group of influencers over, not just the leadership.

We delved into this until the IT leader had what he felt was a satisfactory list of people to attend the workshop.

Grow your people

Q. How might the experience of driving this change become part of people's learning?

Since the Bodurian business leaders wanted their own people to become IT experts, the IT leader realised that he could suggest to them that the Syldavian expert might mentor one of their staff, assisting them with that agenda.

We explored this a little further: Who would nominate the person to be mentored? How would the Syldavian expert be involved in this aspect of their work? How would it be supervised?

This exercise helped the IT leader get unstuck. As it turned out, he used all the ideas he had come up with, and the expert was rapidly accepted by the Bodurians.

That, in a nutshell, is why this model, and coaching itself, can be so powerful. It’s inevitable that we all approach the world in the way we are familiar with.

Working with the right coach – which means someone who understands the field you are operating in, is skilled with useful mental models and with whom you click – enables us all to see our familiar worlds from new perspectives, and so generate new ways of functioning.

This enables us and the businesses we lead to benefit from fresh and improved results.

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This was first published in September 2014

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