More than 30,000 tax assessments were issued in the second quarter of the year, and these generated about 6,000 credit balances, but only 1,084 repayments have actually been sent out since then.
The Policy & Resources Committee admitted yesterday that the speed at which repayments are being issued was not good enough.
‘Without wishing to detract from the hard work of Revenue Service officers, the current rate of issuing repayments is not an acceptable level of service to the public,’ said P&R’s treasury lead Gavin St Pier.
‘I want to assure members that P&R has familiarised itself with the problems and the planned solutions and has provided challenges to deliver more.
‘Meaningful improvement in service levels will be one of the objectives currently being set for the next 12 months for the chief executive [Boley Smillie]. This is and will remain a top priority for the chief executive, his leadership team and the committee.’
The Revenue Service has been beset by problems in recent years, following the amalgamation of income tax and social security collections, the installation of new IT systems and the introduction of independent taxation for every taxpayer.
During a wide-ranging statement about States resources, Deputy St Pier explained why necessary changes to ageing IT systems were causing staff at the Revenue Service additional work and delaying repayment cheques, which currently have to be reviewed manually.
‘Despite the repayment process being the highest priority, this manual process is taking officers a great deal longer than would have been the case with the old systems,’ he said.
‘They are having to familiarise themselves with the way the new systems present the data they need, in order to check and then manually create each repayment.’
He said that P&R understood that problems at the Revenue Service were affecting every member of the community in some way, and he would ask the presiding officer for permission to make a further statement on the matter before the end of the year.
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