How HM Revenue and Customs uses AI

HMRC's VAT Return Analysis Tool brings a VAT trader's entity, ledger and return data for the most recent seven years into one interactive view for VAT officers, and uses a classical statistical model (seasonal trend decomposition with an interquartile range rule) to flag anomalous values in the return history. Officers use it to prepare and carry out compliance checks; the tool makes no decisions, and any assessment is made by an officer and can be appealed through the normal route. HMRC's transparency record says around 5,500 officers are licensed and the tool is used about 1,500 times a day.

• Users served: about 5500, licensed VAT officers

  "Around 5,500 officers have a license to use the tool as part of their VAT compliance work."

  Claimed by: organization
• Interactions handled: about 1500, per day

  "There are ~1,500 daily uses of the tool."

  Claimed by: organization

HMRC's digital assistant answers tax questions typed in plain language, matching them to intents with natural language understanding and replying with non personalised answers that link to GOV.UK guidance. It covers 60 of HMRC's more than 120 taxes, asks the user to choose between likely meanings when unsure, and needs no login. Complex questions escalate to webchat with a human adviser, who sees the whole prior conversation and only continues after identity and verification checks.

• Interactions handled: at least 5.5 million, tax year 2024/25 to 6 March 2025

  "The digital assistant has had 5.48m interactions in the tax year 2024/25 (to date as at 6 March 2025)."

  Claimed by: organization
• Accuracy: 83%, NLU test set, March 2025, known intents

  "83.03% on known intents"

  Claimed by: organization
• Contact deflection: 20%, webchat escalations to an adviser, tax year 2024/25 to 6 March 2025

  "For webchat, 909,000 users have escalated to speak to an adviser in the tax year 2024/25 (to date as at 6 March 2025). That is a 20% decrease on the 2023/24 tax year."

  Claimed by: organization

HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), the UK's tax authority, receives thousands of handwritten and paper tax forms a day, such as agent authorizations, refund claims and tax credit transfers, that took over an hour per document to review manually and drove processing times of up to 45 days. HMRC deployed Hyperscience's intelligent document processing platform, on premises to meet UK government standards, to extract data from the forms with machine learning models trained on them and route only low confidence fields to a person. It reports that most forms are now processed in a day or less, and that it redeployed more than 300 staff to higher value work.

• Cycle time reduction: about 97%, undated vendor case study

  "Document processing times have dropped from up to 45 days to just 1 day in many cases."

  Claimed by: vendor
• Accuracy: 99%, undated vendor case study

  "99%"

  Claimed by: vendor