Low pay but makes up for it in other areas - Personal tax specialist RIFT Tax Refunds Employee Review

Overall brilliant culture and a great place to work! When I started I didn’t have any experience within tax, but Rift has been brilliant in supporting me to become a qualified tax specialist. The job itself is very rewarding and plenty of opportunities to develop your career and progress through the company. Also a lot of flexibility with working from home and coming into the office.

Some cases at first will seem complicated, but everyone is very nice and will be available to support you. Everyone has to start somewhere, as well as the well structured training you receive, you naturally learn a lot on the job too.

Great people to work with and some of the team leaders are absolute gems. When I first started it was a fantastic company. The company benefits (dental, glasses, etc) while not as good as they used to be are decent enough to get a one-time use out of.

I'm not even sure where to start. Let's start with pay; they will pay massively under average for this role as well as roles in the Personal Tax Team and claim they can't afford to raise wages. The Senior Management will tell you that this negatively impacts profits in monthly presentations but they'll never say what their wages are by comparison. Do check what cars they drive though. Whenever the national minimum wage would increase they'd make a big show of saying look we've increased your salary. Secondly, let's talk company culture. There's quite a grim view of 'doing your time in the trenches' which is a direct quote from a senior Tax Specialist. For some reason everything in the company is trial by fire, not so much in the Contact Centre, but very much so in the Personal Tax Team. While my experience of my team leaders was positive overall (I can't thank them enough) there are countless times I was gaslit, witnessed racism, witnessed an openly transphobic man receive promotion after promotion while neglecting the job, blatant sexism in the hiring process of certain roles despite an overwhelmingly feminine workforce, and many more incidents. I was also once told to leave my troubles at the door when I was confessing I had suffered in my personal life. There are outlying incidents that made me desperate to leave the company as well, such as the holiday management in both sides of the business. In the Contact Centre, during my time there, I've since heard the situation is better, requesting holiday was arduous and you would practically have to beg. Priority across the board is always given to managerial favourites. I once planned a trip and attempted to book 2-3 months in advance and was denied; they told me I had to give more notice. Which brings me to my last point; favouritism. It doesn't really matter if you apply for the Contact Centre or Personal Tax Team because both are deeply entrenched in the game of naming favourites. There are cliques and if you are not in those, then undoubtedly, you will be on the outside always. This applies to being given opportunities to progress. Depending on if you are in the Contact Centre or Personal Tax Team this can vary. In the former you'll be locked into one pay rate in the 'leadership' track and forced to over perform so you can get better pay (but if your performance ever slips then you go down) because you're not as well liked. In the latter, you'll be given all the worst cases, slow responders, and scolded for not being able to wrap them up in a timely manner as well as generally being talked down to around the office. Eventually, in this regard, you will be forced to progress in the Personal Tax Team becausethey do not have enough people and the caseloads are enormous. The favouritism is so insane in this place that I have witnessed people I knew who would take shortcuts, all the time, rise to being paid more than the rest of us. I once criticised my team leaders and senior managers for having favourites and not fairly assessing who should be promoted and was in turn told 'you're not a role model' and told i could not progress. They gave me an arbitrary punishment for an arbitrary situation where I criticised them and I wasn't the class favourite. To summarise, the workload is too much for what you get paid, you will be treated poorly. The work to life balance is appalling, because the hours are unreasonable, unless you have a child in which case RIFT will take enough pity on you to MAYBE let you go see their school play. If you are a singleton; poor hours, poor pay, poor progression, sometimes forced progression without decent training, and poor company culture with deep embedded bullying and favouritism.