In January HMRC announced a new Digital Centre in the North East with great fanfare, inviting applications for digital specialists and promising “a culture of innovation not seen across government before.” This new centre will be used to further develop HMRC’s online services, which currently process millions of transactions every month and include everything from Self Assessment filing to RTI Payroll submissions.
Unfortunately, the best laid plans of mice, men and HMRC go oft awry, and the taxman has had to re-advertise more than half of the available posts after failing to recruit suitable candidates. HMRC originally aimed to fill 50 digital positions, 30 of which have now reopened for applications.
It may come as no surprise that designers, developers and programmers are not chomping at the bit to work for HMRC. Technical staff have been in high demand throughout the financial crisis, with IT Contractors seeing consistently high demand despite the turmoil engulfing the financial sector. It’s also worth noting HMRC suffers from the lowest staff morale of all Government departments - hardly a hot ticket when you have plenty of options.
An HMRC spokesperson told economia:
“The vacancies in our digital centre are highly technical roles. We picked up some excellent candidates on the first round of our recruitment but didn’t fill all of them. We are therefore running a second round of recruitment and widening the scope of the advertising to reach more people.”
Photo by Lauren Mitchell
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