Revenue and Customs: Artificial Intelligence

(asked on 28th January 2025) - View Source

Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, for what purposes HM Revenue and Customs has used artificial intelligence in the last 12 months.


Answered by
James Murray Portrait
James Murray
Exchequer Secretary (HM Treasury)
This question was answered on 5th February 2025

As a department, over the last 12 months, HMRC has made use of more ‘traditional’ AI techniques to improve operations and drive productivity.

HMRC’s current applications of the technology can be divided broadly into supporting compliance, customer service and wider operations:

  • In compliance, HMRC uses tools to predict debt risk and likelihood to pay, identifying the customers we need to give more support to. HMRC uses predictive analytics to identify taxpayers most likely to be non-compliant and document analysis to identify cases of potential fraud. All tools maintain a ‘human in the loop’ to take decisions.
  • In customer services, HMRC uses machine learning techniques to understand, categorise and search customer contact data for identifying sentiment and satisfaction rates. HMRC also use these tools to categorise and group feedback which it can use to improve customer journeys and improve services.
  • In its wider operations, HMRC uses machine learning tools to route inbound correspondence to the right teams and summarise and categorise consultation responses. HMRC also uses recommender systems to identify the most appropriate next action for debt recovery and management and using image detection tools to identify websites making fraudulent use of the HMRC logo.
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