Revenue's 1,250 strong 'blunder squad' to clear 7.8m open cases

The Inland Revenue will fund 1,250 extra staff to clear a backlog of 7.8 million open cases caused by the failures of the National Insurance Recording System (Nirs2) and Computerisation of PAYE (CoP) computer systems.

The latest edition of the Inland Revenue's staff newspaper ReveNews reported that the Inland Revenue board has approved funding for the extra staff, "specifically for open case clearance work." It also reports that the Revenue has been unable to meet its open case clearance targets.

Cases remain 'open' when the Revenue cannot resolve difficulties (such as uncertainty over tax paid) before the end of its financial year. Queries on tax records accumulated after problems arose from linking a 15-year-old computerisation of PAYE (CoP) system to the National Insurance Recording System (Nirs2) built in the mid-1990s.

The Revenue would normally have expected about 2.5 million taxpayer records to remain open at the end of the financial year. However, following the advent of Nirs2 and its links to CoP, the number of open cases doubled from 2.4 million in June 1998 to 4.8 million in June 1999. Last month the number stood at 7.8 million.

The Revenue will fund 750 extra staff for the current year and a further 500 people over the next three years, specifically 'to restore normality.'

No figure has officially been put on the project, however initial suggestions have put the potential cost at tens of millions of pounds.

David McKenna, a Revenue spokesman, said: "There have always been so-called 'open cases' and we at the Revenue took the decision to close the cases in question. We have undertaken to correct the outstanding 'open' cases as quickly as possible and have allocated our own resources in the appropriate manner to do so.

"We have undertaken to write to the affected people and alert them to the situation - we want to get these cases sorted out, this obviously takes clerical effort and we are allocating our resources as appropriate to do so."

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Richard Powell, UKTECH