tiintax

I don’t want to say much about the NAO report on HMRC’s customer service, out today, except to note this:

As a consequence, though HMRC continued to live within its agreed budget, the quality of its service to taxpayers collapsed in 2014-15 and the first half of 2015-16. In hindsight, this was a mistake, and not value for money.

Just on my way out the door for a fortnight’s break, but before I go, in what world is the HMRC Large Business Director a suitable job for an external candidate?  Someone from, oh, I don’t know, a large business, perhaps?  In the way that we recruit benefit recipients to manage benefit offices and ex-offenders to run the probation service?  Or even students to be on the governing bodies of schools?  Here’s the advert: https://www.civilservicejobs.service.gov.uk/csr/jobs.cgi?jcode=1494432

And here’s the good bit from the person spec: they want someone who, amongst lots of other things, will

Influencing the department’s strategic direction, in relation to large business work and more generally including through contribution to development of Budget propositions.

See you in a fortnight, probably.  Play nicely!

A correspondent reminds me that, not only is HMRC  haemorrhaging newly-trained (and expensively-trained) younger staff, it is also stiffing its older and more experienced staff too.

Here’s how it works.

HMRC declares that they will be setting up a new Regional Centre in Shinytown.  There will be three thousand staff, lots of exciting career development opportunities, a bright and glorious future…

….except you work in Grotsville.  It’s sixty-five miles away, but you could theoretically drive there in less than an hour, if everyone else didn’t have the same idea at the same time.  And you had a car.  What you actually have to do is walk twenty minutes to the station, take a two hour train ride and then a twenty minute bus ride plus a five minute walk.  And then the same in reverse.  Every day.

Well you could move house, yes, but HMRC won’t pay for it, and anyway the kids have exams.  So you could maybe work in Shinytown and live in Grotsville for a couple of years while the kids finish their exams and *then* move?  You can eat the five hours a day travel time, for a while, if you have to.  What you can’t eat is the six grand a year train and bus fares you’ll have to pay, not when your salary has stayed the same and your take home pay has actually gone down for the last couple of years.  I mean, you’re well paid compared to some people, but not as well paid as all that.  (Remember when MPs’ salaries used to be tied to yours?  You have to laugh, or you’d cry.)

But the last straw – and I mean the last straw, the one that actually broke you – is this.  You’re not being offered a job in Shinytown at all.  No, HMRC is recruiting – something like 9000 shiny new staff to sit in its shiny new offices, with no background or history in how taxes work or the department’s history and ethics and all that canteen culture stuff.  No.  Shinytown will be opening next year whatever.  Grotsville won’t shut till 2020.  Until then, you’re stuck.  Oh, yes, didn’t we say, you can apply for a job in Shinytown and, if you get it, travel at your own expense to the land of career development opportunity.  Or you can stay in Grotsville till it rots, till the last moment when the doors are about to be shut, at which point you’ll be “redeployed” to Shinytown.  If there are any vacancies…

Remember that Dilbert cartoon about how it turns out employees *aren’t* our most valuable asset after all? I couldn’t afford the fee to reproduce it, but here’s the link to look at it for yourself http://dilbert.com/strip/1993-03-03

“A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing” is, famously, the answer to the question “what is a cynic”: perhaps, however, it should be the answer to the question “what is an austerity politician?”

As a retired tax inspector and trades unionist, I still receive copies of ARC news, the journal of the union of senior HMRC professionals, and the latest issue dropped on my doorstep over the weekend.  There is an interesting article on HMRC’s approach to flexibility.  (Essentially most tax professionals could do most of their work from wherever they happened to be, if HMRC provided them with the modern computer and communications equipment to support them and didn’t treat them like children who need to be under the grown-ups’ eye.)  However the passage which interested me was this, and I hope they will forgive me for quoting it in full.

I’ve even heard suggestions that some folk, about to come off the department’s key training scheme as Grade 7s, have been told they are likely to be placed straight into the redeployment pool.  We can’t stop the private sector poaching our trainees – after all we recruit great people, we provide great training and then we pay well below the market rate – but it does seem quite a perverse approach to put someone through this expensive training process only to say, in effect, “we don’t want you”.

So let’s get this straight.  The government pays to recruit people into a career as a tax professional.  It trains them, expensively (because they are a cost to the department in salaries, accommodation and the provision of training and mentoring but are not yet producing the kind of tax yield we get from full tax professionals).  Then, at the point where their training is complete and the investment might start to pay off, we tell them they’re no longer required?

You see, I suppose it could be some kind of machiavellian plot to ensure that the entire tax profession was socialised into the HMRC way of thinking.  It could be, I suppose, if we believe HMRC to have sufficient institutional self-awareness to understand institutionalisation and understand that it actually has a viewpoint.  Why would the industry trouble to support trainees through long and expensive tax training if it can poach HMRC’s, just at the point where they’re trained but not too expensive?  But, ha ha, they all have imbibed the HMRC values with their mother’s milk and will carry on the rest of their careers believing that HMRC is right and the rest of the industry is wrong???

No, I didn’t think so either.  Dear tax industry: get poaching!