“In this life nothing is certain, except death and taxes,” said Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the USA. To this day, billions of taxpayers worldwide identify with this phrase. And then there wasn’t even a phone.

British taxpayers are not only exempted from the eternal bonds of this relationship, but they will have to wait several hours until they are served by the country’s tax service, also known as HMRC, with the main purpose of paying.

The results of the report compiled by the independent National Audit Office (NAO) of Great Britain and published today are characteristic: In total, taxpayers waited with the handset in hand for seven million hours. That is, all together, they “lost” 798 years of life.

The report concerns the tax year 2023-2024. This is almost double the waiting time by phone compared to the period 2019-2020, while in general in the last five years the tax service has failed to fulfill its goals in serving the citizens.

Where are the waits assigned?

According to the Audit Service, the long waiting time may be due to the complicated tax questions, which have arisen in recent years due to changes in taxpayers who request additional information, but also to the high number of sick days declared by the staff of the tax service themselves.

Indeed, sick leave levels for 2023-2024 were 1/3 higher than in 2019-2020. An employee took an average of 11 days of sick leave, significantly more than the average civil servant; which reaches 8 days.

At the same time, and always according to the report, almost 72% of the calls concern problems of the service itself. This means that taxpayers are calling to correct these errors and get additional information about their case, which usually goes to waste until it is completed.

The figures come just months after HMRC scrapped plans to shut down hotlines over the summer. After pressure from MPs, as well as from Finance Minister Jeremy Hunt, this plan was ‘frozen’.

Reactions and next steps

Only on Monday the Treasury announced an extra £51m of funding to the tax office, with the aim of staff answering more calls. Sam Richardson, spokesman for the consumer association Which? he stated that waiting and not finding a solution to tax issues “can have financial and mental health consequences, which is why it is necessary for the service to do more and immediately”.

A spokesman for HMRC, however, while accepting the data, said that “we continue to encourage our customers to use digital services”. A live Telegraph poll with more than 13,000 participants shows, however, that 69% want to contact the tax office by phone and only 24% online (via email or chatbot).

Zoe Katzagiannakis, London