Chief Executive of HMRC to step down in April
11 January 2016
Lin Homer has announced that she is to leave HMRC in April, after more than four years as Chief Executive and Permanent Secretary and a public service career spanning 36 years.
Lin Homer joined HMRC in January 2012 and led the organisation through a period of recovery and significant performance improvements, including:
- successive, record-breaking increases in total revenues and compliance revenues
- the reduction of the tax gap and tax credits error and fraud, both to record lows
- a new governance structure for assuring tax settlements
- an ambitious transformation programme to digitise services for customers and make HMRC a smaller, more flexible and highly-skilled organisation based in 13 large Regional Centres
- two successful Spending Reviews in which HMRC received around £2.3 billion in reinvestment for that transformation.
- a recovery in customer service from a low-point of 48% calls answered in 2011, to almost 90% calls answered in December 2015, with a queuing time of six minutes.
HMRC’s press release does acknowledge that there were ‘customer service issues’ in the first quarter of 2015-16.
A process is now underway to select a new Chief Executive for HMRC. More details will be provided in due course.
Lin Homer has confirmed that she is not currently actively seeking her next role and intends to take a break over the summer.