AS IF a National Audit Office report last month detailing 44 million missed telephone calls last year (47 percent of those made) didn’t pose enough questions over HM Revenue & Customs’ “contact centres”, the Eye has discovered some very unusual arrangements for choosing the people to run them.
HMRC’s first call centre, and still one of its largest, is in East Kilbride, just outside Glasgow. Since June last year it has been managed by a certain Robert Bowering, a call centre veteran with firms including HSBC and call centre outsourcing firm beCogent Ltd. But his appointment at HMRC was far from his first encounter with the taxman. At Linlithgow sheriff court in March, just three months before he started working at HMRC, Bowering had been made bankrupt… by HMRC!
Bowering’s debt, the origins of which are not known, stands at £75,545, of which the Accountant in Bankruptcy (Scotland’s insolvency service) officially estimates it will recover, er, precisely £0. So how did a man made bankrupt over unpaid tax land a job advising everybody else on their tax bills?
Mr Bowering was brought in - on higher pay than the normal level for his grade - by a personal friend of his: the department’s director of contact centres, Linda Maslen. Until the Eye became interested, the two could be found as each other’s “friend” on their Facebook pages. They had worked at HSBC’s firstdirect telephone banking business at the same time in the 1990s.
HMRC insists that, although Maslen had “advocated” her chum’s appointment, the correct procedures had then been followed taking into account “the risks posed by appointing someone who is insolvent, and the organisation’s ability to manage those risks”. So that’s all right, then. |
