Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what assessment she has made of the adequacy of HMRC's processing of refund requests for taxpayers.

HMRC aims to process all refunds and repayments within a reasonable timeframe. The processing of these is recorded as part of HMRC’s post turnaround measure. HMRC’s service standard for post turnaround is 80% of customer correspondence cleared within 15 working days of receipt. HMRC’s performance has been 77% from April to August 2024.

Post performance is published monthly and can be accessed at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/hmrc-monthly-performance-reports#reporting-year-2024-to-2025.

To improve their services and meet published standards HMRC have recently deployed additional customer service advisers. They expect to meet their post service standards in the second half of 2024-25 as the new advisers are trained and up to speed.