Archive for February, 2016

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Ten things Jon Thompson should do first

February 25, 2016

Congratulations to Jon Thompson, the new CEO of HMRC and to Edward Troup, the new Executive Chair.  What are the first things that ought to be on their to-do lists as they start their new posts?  Here are a few suggestions – feel free to add others in the comments.

  1. Appoint some civil society non-execs  Look at the Board members here: Ian Barlow was a senior partner at KPMG.  Joanna Baldwin is a digital strategy consultant.  John Whiting heads the OTS.  Mervyn Walker comes from British Airways and Anglo American,  Simon Ricketts from Rolls Royce.  Edwina Dunn came from a data mining company.  All good fits with the HMRC strategy, no doubt, but where is the “critical friend” there to speak up for the ordinary taxpayer, the elderly, the digitally excluded?  Cast your net a bit wider.
  2. Appoint some board level women and minorities  Look again at the Board pictures: seven men and five women.  But replace Homer with Thompson and you have eight men and four women.  And an Oscar-worthy level of whiteness.  You’re going to have to deal with an equal pay claim from your staff that I hear is already dragging its slow way through the courts.  Why not make a point of ensuring equality and diversity are baked in from the start?
  3. Be nicer to your staff.  There’s a really low bar to meet here!  HMRC bumps along the bottom of the Civil Service staff survey, there’s an equal pay dispute, compulsory redundancies on the horizon, a toxic relationship with the unions – seriously, you could be a Good Guy, a Hero even, with very little effort on your part.  Just be a decent human being, talk to people, and do your best and you’ll be fine.
  4. Check the plans for the redoubt  Seriously, is withdrawing from huge areas of the country into thirteen redoubts the best way forwards?  It’s probably cheaper (but why can’t staff work remotely?  Don’t you have secure computers and phone lines any more???) but you’ll lose good people from inside – and you risk losing the goodwill of the taxpaying public you serve.  If you’re going to do it anyway, then you need a charm offensive to get people outside of the Whitehall bubble – inside and, more importantly, outside of the department – on side.
  5. Sort out the phones.  If it was me, I’d make up a rota.  Every Board meeting, one Board member should come prepared with a recording of a call they’d made to ask a question.  Just sit round a table and listen to how many menus they have to go through, how many times they have to speak to an automated system, before they get to a human being (time it!).  The actual call – well, you could send a letter of commendation to the officer they finally speak to, assuming they handle the human part of the transaction as well as most of your staff do.  It’s the getting to the buggers that’s a, well, bugger!
  6. Slow down the rate of change.  Look at the TIINs for every single consultation that you publish and every new piece of legislation you propose.  See that question on “policy objective”?  Look on CivilWiki at the instructions on how to complete a TIIN.  See the seven questions model.  The first question to be answered is always why are you doing this at all?  Put the CEO behind asking for an answer, and you could single-handedly slow down the pace of change in tax legislation for a generation!
  7. Get rid of outsourcing.  There’s a reason tax collectors are so reviled in the Bible: they were outsourced agents of the Roman Empire.  Or, to put it another way, people often hate dealing with HMRC.  But they hate even more having to deal with some profit-making entity acting on behalf of HMRC.
  8. Integrate debt collection and customer service  Honestly.  It sounds counter-intuitive, but if you dismiss debts of £100 or so as not worth collection you’re missing people at the start of their relationship with HMRC.  Look at what happens with CIS monthly penalties if you don’t go out and talk to people the first time they miss one.
  9. Remember history  HMRC and its predecessor departments have a long and proud history.  But a rubbish archive.  Seriously, employ an historian and a couple of archivists and you’ll find most of your problems have been considered, solved and then recreated before, sometimes several times.
  10. SaMBA all the time No, I don’t want you to start Strictly in the 100PS courtyard (although if you do, can I watch?)  But I was charmed to learn yesterday that the Small Firms Impact Test is now called the Small and Micro Business Assessment, or SaMBA.  Now I have some experience of this.  It’s hard to find small and micro businesses who will talk to you.  You have to go outside of London, outside of office hours, and outside of your comfort zone.  Because if you don’t, you end up with VAT MOSS…

Good luck!

Posted in HMRC | 2 Comments »

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Greg Wise and the Sealions

February 8, 2016

Isn’t it time we stopped sea lioning the debate about tax avoidance?

“Sea lioning” is a useful new internet coinage that originates with this cartoon – you start off talking on the internet about something and are constantly interrupted by people – polite, reasonable-sounding people – asking you to back up your statements.   What’s wrong with that, you say?  Speaking as a trainee academic, absolutely nothing, I reply.  Except sealioning isn’t quite that…

For the person doing it, it’s a way of avoiding the issue by tying up the opponent in red tape.  Make them prove their assertions, their arguments, their premises line by line.  The earth is round, you say?  Can you cite your evidence for that, please?

For the person on the receiving end, it’s like arguing with a sponge.  It soaks up all your time and energy and gives nothing back.

Every time there’s a story about tax avoidance, every, single, time, there are the same arguments.  It’s all legal.  Companies are only maximising shareholder returns as they’re obliged to do.  The law is too complicated, but that’s the responsibility of law makers, not the tax industry.

I like following this kind of thing on twitter.  There’s a lively bunch of tax mavens on twitter but the use of a hashtag means there are all kinds of people joining in the debate.  It’s a bit like shouting at the television, but the television shouts back.

Any programme about tax, like the Dispatches programme I’ve just watched?  First random example I clicked on:

Do you think we could just park that, park all the other “avoidance is perfectly legal” arguments for the moment, the length of the tax code, the tax is theft arguments, add your own favourite.  Just park them.  Just for the moment.

There.

Now.  Some people think paying tax is voluntary.  Can we perhaps agree that this is a bad idea, and work back from that?

 

Posted in Avoidance | Leave a Comment »

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Identity

February 2, 2016

How long does it take for an issue to fall from “current affairs” into “history” or to be forgotten altogether?

I ask because I had an odd experience while completing my tax return on Sunday afternoon (well of course I left it to the last minute – I’m a retired tax inspector, after all, and you know what they say about the dentist’s children’s teeth).

Because I had checked (and written a smug blog entry about it) that I was able to log onto the HMRC system in good time this year.  But when I sat down on Sunday morning and typed “HMRC self assessment” into google I didn’t get back to the expected page with my details already saved.  Instead I found myself in gov.uk at a page headed “sign in and file your self assessment tax return” which had a link to “sign into your online account“… which did NOT have my login details already filled in as I had hoped.

Now I had, of course, taken the precaution of writing down my “HMRC User ID” (and my UTR) inside the front cover of my account book.  But I had not written down my password and it seemed my computer had not helpfully retained it in its memory and it was now 11am on 31st January and ouch!  And, incidentally, if you need a new password (which was my first thought) you can only get one if you agree to have an “online Government account email address” which I have so far refused to accept.  This is because I suspect that signing into a government email address will be as much a bore and a chore as signing into one’s self assessment account, and I utterly refuse to have legal notices like notices to file and reminders to file sent to an address which it is unlikely I will remember to log into.  To me, a reminder goes to, you know, the thing you actually look at like your ACTUAL email address.

But this is beside the point, which was that time was getting on and I still hadn’t managed to log into my self assessment account and it didn’t look as if I was going to be getting a new password any time soon enough to make a difference.  Aha!  I thought, I can follow one of the other links on the “sign in and file  your self assessment” page which helpfully offers the option of signing in with “a GOV.UK Verify account”

I don’t know what that is, I thought, but it sounds like something I should have.

So I went to this page and clicked on “this is my first time using Verify” and arrived… here.

Now, if you haven’t clicked on any links so far in this blog, I suggest you click on this one, because it tells you that

A certified company will verify your identity. They’ve all met security standards set by government.

A “certified company”.  Not HMRC.  Not any arm of the government.  A “certified company”.  They are:

  • Verizon
  • Experian
  • Digidentity
  • Post Office

I failed to register with the Post Office, and then I failed to register with Experian, mainly because I had already given them a remarkable number of details from my drivers licence and my debit card and they then wanted my passport details as well which I refused to give them.

I realise that 2006 is a long time ago, but do we recall the protests against the introduction of a national identity card scheme?  I seem to recall that the one of the principal objections was that it would enable government to join up different databases and put together an enormous mass of data about our individual movements and activities.  There was a campaigning group, NO2ID, which still seems to be operational.

I was never quite sure which side of the argument I was on.  I used to be a tax inspector, after all, so I could see just how bloody useful being able to join up government databases would be.

But to me, if there’s one thing worse than having a government identity card scheme, it’s having a privatised one.  Great flying spaghetti monster, I’d rather have a democratically elected government tracking me than… an American mobile phone company, a credit reference agency, a private Dutch company or the bloody Post Office!

(After lunch I tried again.  I googled “HMRC login”, which took me straight to this page, where my HMRC User ID and the password were already helpfully in place.  Phew!  And, yes, I’ve done my tax return, on time, thanks.  Inner peace my eye!)

So.  What do we think about Verify accounts?

Posted in Big data, Bit of politics, Digital, Gov.uk, HMRC | Leave a Comment »