This audio interview reveals a very difficult situation within the UK HMRC, which has the responsibility to collect taxes, with £40 billion uncollected tax due to bad software systems and under-staffing.
There are a million pieces of unanswered post. It will be taking 3 months to answer them, which itself might increase the problem further if a person has to pay back taxes with interest.
The UK HMRC contact centers are severely under-staffed, and that fact comes out from numerous press reports of people having to wait for a long time just to be able to speak to a tax officer to understand any discrepency in the tax numbers they have with them vs what HMRC is asking from them.
The average tax payment due is about £1400 and about 1.4 million people will receive letters from HMRC by Christmas.
So if you are in the UK and frustrated with not having any response from the HMRC, now you understand that many others are facing the same, and that the staff at HMRC are stretched to the limits already.
As long as you keep the communication from your side intact, it should be okay.