To think the tax office is a joke?

[PassingStranger]

Why is everything so crap? Over an hour hanging on the phone to the tax office earlier then gave up.
How can you keep people waiting that long?
They don't tell you how long the queue is either.
Just the same boring repetitive message all the time!!

It's disgusting.
What if you can't hang on forever?
They also got rid of local tax offices and built houses instead.

You could actually go to your local tax office but no they shut them down.
If they want people to pay tax, don't make it such an ordeal to get through and take on more staff?

Aha, I have those skills!
I say, 'Alice in Wonderland' to every question the bot asks me, and after a while (and I imagine a robot sigh) it says, 'Hold on, while I transfer you to someone who can help...'
This works for lots of bots - they give up if you can't press a number.
Let me know if it works for HMRC!

HMRC and before them the Inland Rev has never been the most efficient Govt. Dept.

I dealt with them all my working life and to my mind the reason it seems worse now is that having cut the "professional" side of HMRC to the bone, the cuts have now hit the Local Tax Inspectors and the PAYE side with the result that more people are affected by it, not just IFAs and accountants.

(One boss I worked for refused to employ ex-Tax Office people on account of what she called their total ignorance of how the UK tax system worked.)