HMRC to use voice recognition to speed up calls

Callers to HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) will be able to use their voice as a password in a bid to speed up calls, a government minister has announced.

The UK tax authority has been heavily criticised for its failure to answer tens of thousands of calls, and for long delays on phonelines.

James Murray, Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, said HMRC was trialling a system used by banks to use voice recognition to improve call handling.

This would allow callers to pass security checks “faster and more securely”, he said.

The system is expected to be introduced across HMRC phonelines during the rest of the year.

Customers’ voice recordings are converted into encrypted biometric data, then used to clear security checks.

The announcement comes as part of a series of measures the government says will improve HMRC services and make the authority “quicker, fairer and more modern”.

Mr Murray announced the plans in a speech to tax professionals on Tuesday.

“We are going further and faster to overhaul the way HMRC works,” he said.

That included simplifying systems, such as the declaration of income from so-called side-hustles for tax purposes.

It also meant learning from the private sector to make customer service more efficient.

A report by the Public Accounts Committee of MPs in January included figures that showed the failings of HMRC’s phone line.

It went dead on 43,690 customers who had been waiting 70 minutes to reach an adviser in the first 11 months of the 2023-24 financial year.

This was because HMRC’s system could not cope with the volume of calls, but customers were not warned they were about to be cut off, nor were they called back, the report added.

The committee claimed HMRC was running a “deliberately poor” phone service in an attempt to push taxpayers to seek help online instead.

However, that claim was described as “completely baseless” by HMRC bosses who said they had made huge improvements to service standards.

In March last year, HMRC announced its phone line would be closed between April and September, but was forced to reverse its decision within 24 hours.