THOUSANDS of tax office workers returned to the picket lines yesterday amid widespread anger at further job cuts for the beleaguered agency.

About 15,000 trade unionists working for Revenue and Customs in Scotland and the north-east began a rolling strike action yesterday in a bid to head off Con-Dem cuts that would see the department’s workforce more than halved in a decade.

The Coalition has enraged public-sector unions and social-justice campaigners by ravaging HMRC with swingeing job cuts despite the tough talk on tax enforcement.

The Public and Commercial Services union’s HMRC assistant group secretary John Davidson said that years of successive job cuts had left the organisation unable to cope, with delays on the phone, huge backlogs of post and private debt collectors being brought in to chase up tax credit overpayments.

“Members are extremely angry that staffing numbers in HMRC have fallen from 104,000 in 2005 to a projected 60,000 next year.

“The latest plans to sack another 22,000 on top of this will lead to the kind of backlogs we’ve seen in other parts of the civil service such as the delays in the processing of passports. It will lead to an unacceptable level of customer service and further hardship for our undervalued, overworked and underpaid members,” he said.

The strikes will continue today in Yorkshire and Humberside and the east of England, with other regions following suit over the next three days. Up to 55,000 staff could be involved.