The boss of HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has defended its poor record on answering telephone calls.

It follows a report from Citizens Advice, which said thousands of people were waiting 47 minutes to get their calls answered. "I don't think the overall trend is worsening," Lin Homer, HMRC's chief executive, told MPs. The National Audit Office (NAO) also said recently that too few calls were being answered within five minutes. "We aren't answering enough calls within five minutes, but we are now doing more 'once and done' calls," she said, meaning that taxpayers only needed to phone once. "We have already apologised for what we see as a failure in our performance at the end of last year, and the first couple of months of this year," she told members of the Public Accounts Committee. In June this year, she apologised for the service, which she admitted was "not up to scratch", after figures showed that a quarter of calls went unanswered.....Read more here