Taxpayers who call the tax credits and self assessment helplines can enrol for voice identification in order to speed up the security process with HMRC.

A passphrase will be repeated by the caller, up to five times, and the recorded phrase will be used to identify the taxpayer in the future.

The system will go live soon, but activation and recording of the passphrase has already started.

Those who use HMRC’s mobile app can already use fingerprints to access the information on Apple and Android devices: HMRC plan to introduce this for Windows versions of the app during 2017.