Details are expected soon of a recovery plan drawn up by the Revenue Service, which has won the backing of States chief executive Boley Smillie, but problems going back years are taking longer to resolve than originally hoped.
‘We are certainly not going to see a return entirely to normal service in less than months, but I believe we are going to be able to demonstrate good quality progress over this year,’ said Mr Smillie.
Nine months ago he said that he wanted the Revenue Service to become a ‘model of excellence’ in the public sector. At that time, he admitted he did not know how long that would take but expected to see improvements in months.
A new director of operations, Jean Mehers, joined the Revenue Service in November, leaving the private sector to spearhead change at the beleaguered States department, which is battling a years-long backlog affecting tens of thousands of individual and corporate taxpayers.
‘I understand that she will shortly talk more broadly about the recovery plan which she is initiating and which I have obviously seen behind the scenes,’ said Mr Smillie.
‘We need to focus much more on improvement rather than necessarily repeating the findings we have already found.
‘What people really want to know about Revenue Service transformation is this – when are all the backlogs going to be dealt with and when are all the issues going to be resolved?
‘I have got every confidence in the current leadership of the Revenue Service to be able to deliver that.’
He has said that sorting out the Revenue Service was at or near the top of his ‘to do’ list.
An announcement about project failures, made by the Policy & Resources Committee last year, included spending £24m. on new systems at the Revenue Service which made things worse for taxpayers and staff, as well wasting almost as much on a customer services scheme known as MyGov which delivered no substantial improvement.
But an investigation launched at that time, the damning findings of which were published this week, was restricted to the MyGov disaster, and the ensuing report did not mention the Revenue Service fiasco by name, saying only that some other projects had experienced similar problems.
‘I have undertaken a fairly high level review of the issues with Revenue Service transformation and concluded that some of the themes are duplicated,’ said Mr Smillie. ‘Some of the errors of judgement are duplicated across programmes.
‘The deep dive investigation that has been done on MyGov is not as necessary with the Revenue Service transformation because we’ve already picked up the issues with that.’