HMRC explores use of artificial intelligence for tax cases

HMRC's letter and pound coins - Image credit: HMRC

HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) is looking at how artificial intelligence could be used for “compliance and complex tax cases”.

The department’s acting digital transformation director Brigid McBride said that the department was “dipping our toe in AI” and considering the role it might play in some of its operations. 

Some robotics tools are also being implemented in its front-end customer service offerings, she told attendees at the Public Sector ICT event hosted in London this week by Holyrood’s parent company, Dods.

She said: “We use a lot of new channels like social media, to help deal with simple queries.

“We also have a virtual assistant – called Rita – a very simple robotics technology.

“The pace of change is not slowing, the demands of our customers are growing, and our customers are moving towards self-employment.

“The real challenge is building an organisation that can absorb that change and adapt to it.”

The tax agency has set a target of automating 10 million processes by the end of the year and its journey towards this goal is being fuelled by the ideas of its employees, according to McBride.

“We have been absolutely crushed by the enthusiasm,” she said.

“We did a bottom-up approach instead of a big programme.

“We put in the capability then asked staff to identify processes that they felt could automate.

“We ended up with hundreds of small projects that were all things that people really cared about.

She added: “With robotics, we have been working with our customer services.

“If you have an old and ageing technology, your call centre staff [will appreciate] a simple solution that brings data together and then repopulates the legacy system.

“That movement and that excitement will be the thing that help us get to that 10 million.

“We did not have to push it, [on staff] it was pulled in.”