Word to the wise; don’t bother emailing Revenue
Thursday, August 23rd, 2007As with any kind of freelance work, one additional responsibility that comes along is that of keeping yourself tax compliant.
I’ve technically been a freelancer since March 2006 and it has been the sole source of my income since then, so I now need to make sure my taxes are in order in time for the 31st October deadline this year (at least I think I do, anyway).
I recently decided to (finally) get the ball rolling on this and register myself as self-employed, although I hadn’t the first clue how to do it. So to get help figuring this out I emailed Revenue on the 30th of July and asked them for pointers on what I needed to do.
A few days passed and I had heard nothing in return so I decided to take the old-fashioned route and ring them instead; I was passed onto a helpful man who told me what form I needed to fill out (a TR1, apparently) and where I needed to send it, so I printed it off from their site and posted it a day or two later.
At the start of this week I got a letter to tell me I had been registered for income tax and could now take the next step in the process, which was to file my annual accounts/income/something for 2006.
I followed the advice of the letter and logged onto their Revenue Online Service website. I filed in a few details and am now waiting for some code or another to be sent out to me so I can do the dog work online, rather than through the post. How very modern.
So this morning I awoke to find an email from Revenue in my inbox - I thought it was something to do with the ROS site, like the code I needed to register, or a problem that they had encountered… nope. It was an email from a helpful individual informing me of what I needed to do to register for income tax as a self employed person… a response to the mail I sent them nearly a month ago. I do appreciate the fact that they got back to me, but it is 24 days later.
So my advice to you - if you’re looking to contact Revenue about something urgent, use the telephone and save your emails for someone who gives a damn.
Blogs elsewhere
August 24th, 2007 at 9:48 am
I have to agree, but sadly it’s not confined to the Revenue, nor to ‘public service. I reckon that in the end, technology has done nothing for customer service! I don’t know how many times I’ve emailed various organisations, only to have my email disappear off into that by black cyberhole. You read these fancy websites and it says “contact us: blah blah @ something dot ie” And you write out your request and innocently fire it off. I often wondered what percentage of them just sit in redundant inboxes collecting electrons, and what percentage get read by lazy employees whose managers have forgotten there is an inbox. So the employee reads the query or plea, then laughs to him or herself while clicking delete.
And as for the voice recognition systems… well…
http://fichefocal.blogspot.com/2007/08/automated-anguish.html
August 24th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
The problem with email is just how easy it is to either ignore or forget about.
If you get a few emails you might read through them and think “I’ll have to reply to that” as you go - but then you forget. You might also read something you don’t want to answer, so you don’t and hope it goes away.
If someone’s on the phone it’s harder to forget to answer them and harder to ignore them too… even snail mail is better in that regard as a physical object in your hand is hard to forget about.
August 27th, 2007 at 9:32 am
Absolutely. But it’s also a question of management and taking your customer seriously. Companies who are serious about it have systems whereby each email generates an entry on their Customer Request database. Team managers can see X number of problems outstanding and can assign them to people. In this way people cannot really forget because when the customer agent logs in they see that there are a number of unanswered requests against their name.