Adjudicatorsoffice Reviews 6

After 13 years of putting reviews on Trustpilot (8 of which have been 1 star), I can confidently say that The Adjudicator’s Office is the worst 1 star organisation of my experience.
Here’s the history:-
1) Complaint accepted for investigation – “aim to commence your investigation within six to eight weeks”
2) When nothing happened within that timescale, I phoned and received an unsigned e-mail “Your complaint will be taken into investigation within the next few weeks”
3) Eight weeks later, nothing had happened. Coincidentally, this was four months after my complaint had been accepted for investigation and the only service standard that The Adjudicator’s Office has is “to resolve cases within four months of receipt” – hard to achieve if you haven’t even started your investigation by then.
4) Obviously I wanted to complain about this but there is no way of doing so. Accordingly, I wrote to The Adjudicator personally to tell him why I had lost confidence in his organisation.
5) Over a month later, I have not even had the courtesy of an acknowledgement.

For purposes of balance, I should say that the Chief Executive of HMRC says some very nice things in The Adjudicator’s Office annual report of 2024. On the other hand, would you trust a five star review of a guard dog written by a burglar whose visit the dog had slept through?
In conclusion, Sir Humphrey is still alive and well in Whitehall and his capacity for dreaming up ingenious mechanisms for avoiding accountability remains undimmed.

Warned before making my complaint of the Adjudicator’s bias towards the HMRC and that I would not receive a fair and impartial outcome.
Unfortunately, these warnings were correct and as predicted a totally one sided outcome in favour of the HMRC.
Total waste of everyone’s time.

Despite having evidence I kept from a case almost 14 years ago they are biased towards HMRC. I talked at length & sent every bit of paper evidence & even phonebills -but because HMRC delete THEIR call records etc after 10 years they will say your proof is invalid & they " cant locate the recording" . BS. Took 4 months to investigate & letters full of spelling mistakes. They will find every unfair loophole they can. Very bad service that will ALWAYS side with the governing body you're complaining about. Causes stress, confusion & inconvenience

A absolute wast of time it’s a shame you can’t just bypass them all together but if you call them they seem to panic and get things moving but the investigation is very half hearted and I’m not even sure they even do a investigation so use them as a stepping stone to the ombudsman then seek civil legal action

Totally agree with the other review, the Adjudicators office is heavily biased towards helping HMRC. I also provided clear evidence on 2 complaints and both were not accepted. On the 2 complaint the Adjudicators would not even look at this because there was an outstanding tribunal, this made no sense because I wanted a successful complaint to show as evidence at that tribunal. This is just a lip service to justify the poor performance of HMRC.

Hi

This is a review of the HMRC adjudicator.

We provided a lot of solid evidence to the adjudicator. The vat inspector who did a poor job was finally taken off. HMRC never do this. Hence this is the greatest proof of what we had said. Also there were many emails to HMRC which I provided as proof to the adjudicator. Also the inspector had falsely raised vat of 12K not due and in the end accepted what we had said that the client was due a vat rebate of 12K instead and after 6 months she finally paid our client what they should have been paid in the first place
HMRC did not respond to most of the emails on important issues raised by a senior accountant. Because of the poor response we had to send
50 emails. We wasted a huge amount of our professional time for a matter that should have been settled in 5 emails at the most. We had to bear the loss of this because of the wrong actions of HMRC staff and adjudicator's staff.
For a handful of invoices the vat inspector made several visits. I have had inspectors who have checked 10 times more invoices in 1 visit.
Then this inspector made up things about our senior accountant to hide her poor performance on the job. All he did was ask her to apply the vat rules after copying and pasting them in emails to her. She still did not apply them. Hence rightly she was not believed by the senior HMRC officer who believed our accountant.

The HMRC technical review officer found in our favour not in the inspectors favour. The inspector tried to charge vat for an invoice raised before the client registered for vat. She did not know even the basic vat rules.
The staff at the adjudicators (and HMRC complaints staff. They normally also close ranks with colleagues in the wrong) ignored all our evidence. She only contacted the HMRC did not contact us even once and wrongly and deliberately gave her decision in HMRC's favour in spite of the contrary solid evidence provided by us. HMRC staff had only made up a few things of no relevance. Then to cop it all up the adjudicator sent us her decision in an envelope provided by HMRC. When I rang her she said that the adjudicator staff work closely with the HMRC proving that the adjudicator's office is not independent but biased in favour of HMRC and try to fool the good British Public by pretending to be independent.
The HMRC complaints staff do the same.Hence the good British public have to put up with a lot of injustice and unfair treatment.

Kind regards