Not waving…
October 18, 2013Yes, I’m still alive. No, I haven’t posted for over a month. Long story short: had a ridiculously bad cold at the same time as a short term contract to deliver some training at the same time as the new university term started. Blogging, I’m afraid, fell towards the bottom of the “to do” list and, as I never got much beyond “Work. Eat. Take medication. Sleep.” I’m afraid I’ve been out of the tax consultation loop for a bit.
So where are we now?
I started off with a quick gallop through the gov.uk consultations page to see what was open and if anything was coming to a close soon…
…which gave me some odd results. The page tells me that government has 144 open consultations today, which is a substantial number, and that ten of them are HMRC’s. But as I glanced down the list of ten I started thinking, hang on, this is odd – haven’t I already answered this one?
So I filtered again, by “all departments” and subject is “tax and revenue”, and got a list of nine tax consultations.
Eight of which are already closed.
Um… hello, gov.uk? I left feedback on both pages, but I think your search engine is…. (looks for polite alternative to the word that immediately springs to mind. Settles for:) in need of some remedial attention.
All right then, let’s go back to my own laboriously constructed spreadsheet from July 22, which shows no tax consultations with a closing date after October 14th. And then let’s go back to gov.uk and search for “all consultations” published by HMRC after 22/7/13.
This brings up a list of 16 results: seven consultation outcomes, four closed consultations and five “open consultations”. Good: now we’re getting somewhere.
They are:
- Tax-Free Childcare – closed
- Alcohol fraud: next steps – closes 28th October
- Reform of an anti-avoidance provision: Transfer of Assets Abroad – closed
- Residence of Offshore Funds – extending the scope of Section 363A Taxation Act 2010 – closed
- Investment Management Exemption and Collective Investment Schemes: expanding the “white list”- closed
So, sorry gov.uk, but something is going wrong with your classification system. And now I’ve run out of time to blog for today, too, and all I’ve achieved is to identify there seems to be only one open tax consultation.
Which is, I suppose, at least something. Sigh.
tiintax 
Glad you’re feeling better; shame gov.uk had to bring you back to reality with a bump… I still maintain that their search page should include the terms “beware of the leopard” and a picture of a filing cabinet in a disused lavatory etc…