HMRC have adopted the policy for some time now of referring to tax payers as customers. I have never been quite sure why they have insisted upon this since most of us would choose not to be customers of HMRC, if we had any choice.

If we are customers then we must ask ourselves whether the customer care we receive is all it should be.

A client of my firm recently received a notice stating that their gross payment status was being withdrawn under the construction industry scheme. Anyone in the construction industry will know only too well the cash flow problems that can be caused by having gross payment status withdrawn.

The reason given for the withdrawal of gross payment status was 'that the 2008/09 P35 hadn't been received'.

Having submitted the said 'P35' by recorded delivery on 5 May, the client rang HMRC to find out what the problem was. They were informed that HMRC had indeed received the P35 in early May, but hadn't logged, or processed it, until 25 June, thus giving the impression that the P35 was late in being submitted.

At this point the client called their HMRC construction industry scheme contact to pass on the information, only to be told that they would still need to officially appeal against the withdrawal of their gross payment status.

In other words, having failed to log and process a customer's P35, another department of HMRC had then withdrawn their gross payment status because of the first HMRC department's failure! Then, to add insult to injury, the "customer" was told that they had to appeal against the notice withdrawing gross payment status, which should never have been issued in the first place!

With customer service like that, commercial businesses would not be expecting to keep their customers for very long!