Archive for the ‘Bit of politics’ Category

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Resource usage

April 7, 2016

If you look at HMRC’s list of deliberate tax defaulters here you’ll see pubs and sandwich bars, window salesmen and an eBay trader.  You won’t see many accountants or wealth management companies and there’s nothing there that screams to me “concealed overseas assets and income”.

There’s an interesting piece of qualitative research here which looks at the attitudes of people given prison sentences for tax evasion as a result of the “volume crime initiative” – which looks at VAT fraud, undeclared income and use of fraudulent documents.

And, I don’t know about your google skills, but I can’t seem to find a more recent “HMRC most wanted” list than this one from 2013 which shows a gallery of… well, click on them yourselves.  VAT fraud, fag smuggling, a smuggler of non-EU garlic incorrectly described as ginger…

I have a simple question for HMRC.  How many staff (how many “FTE” – full time equivalent – staff) are engaged on the detection, investigation and prosecution of booze and fag smuggling.  And how many are engaged on examining the Panama papers and will be allocated to investigate and ultimately prosecute any wrongdoers?

Posted in Avoidance, Bit of politics, HMRC | 3 Comments »

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Before the Panama papers…

April 4, 2016

I am writing this at seven o’clock on Monday evening, before Panorama airs its programme on the Panama papers, so it’s not based on any knowledge of the programme but on the various comments I have seen on FaceBook and other social media today.  I just want to say three things.

First, tax is not “a private matter” (as the PM’s spokeswoman apparently told The Guardian).  The Prime Minister’s salary is £143,462 and is widely used as a measure of what is meant by a substantial salary, not least in various shock horror stories in the press.  If he is also the beneficiary of an offshore family trust which hasn’t paid tax, do we really think this is a “private matter” or something which should be disclosed in the public interest?

Secondly, is it not time that we took the shackles off HMRC with regard to taxpayer confidentiality more generally?  As Jolyon Maugham has written today:

I could stand, smiling, on national news, next to HMRC’s Chief Executive and declare that I had paid every penny I owed and even if HMRC’s Chief Executive knew this [to be] an outrageous lie she would still not be able to contradict me.

Personally I can see no reason why tax returns should not be open to publication under the Freedom of Information Act, and particularly that MPs’ and Lords’ returns ought to be laid before Parliament (so that it would be a resignation matter were they found to be inaccurate).  But if that is a step too far, can those clever legal eagles amongst us not devise some form of unshackling that at the very least allows HMRC to give one of three responses when asked:

  • This person has made a return and their self assessment has not been audited.
  • This person’s self assessment has been audited and no major issues were found.
  • This person’s self assessment has been audited and either negotiations are ongoing or they have repaid £x tax plus £y interest and £z penalties.

Finally: can HMRC deal with the Panama Papers effectively at all?  By which I mean, do they have the resources?  Back in 2013 ARC, the union of senior managers in HMRC, put forward a Budget submission where they requested

Additional legal resources, 150 trained lawyers and 50 legal assistants, to accelerate litigation of the Tribunal backlog and accelerate yield.

Cost       £45.5m
Projected yield over 4 years to 2016/17       £2000m

Did they ever get their 200 additional legal and paralegal staff?  Are they now staffed to examine the panama papers and take forward any prosecutions that might arise?  Does the government seriously want them to, or would it rather they sat quietly on their hands, or “worked within their funding envelope”?

Take a wild guess.

Posted in Avoidance, Bit of politics, HMRC | Leave a Comment »

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Consultation day

April 1, 2016

It’s that time of year again: the Budget is over but the summer recess isn’t quite upon us yet.  A good time for publication of consultations for some of the more, er, challenging ideas the government has in its bottom drawer.  If you go to gov.uk and search on today’s date you’ll see the following new consultations are out there from today.  And some are further out there than others!

  1. Set up a rival Revenue and Customs body.  Like the old joke about “how come there’s only one Monopolies commission?”, it has long been argued in certain quarters that HM Revenue and Customs would benefit from the injection of a little competition.  Well, now you have your opportunity to comment on the proposals.  Once HMRC retreats into its 13 redoubts, the proposal is to ask a couple of venture capitalists to provide the start up funds for new networks of tax offices and customs centres, based on the schools academy proposals.  The idea is that a local tax office would be part of a chain of offices owned by (say) Richard Branson or Lord Sugar.  Tax customers would then choose whether they wanted to pay the standard HMRC tax, the Sugar Tax (where all the tax rates would stay the same except for the one on Sugar, obviously) or the Virgin Tax, where apparently there would be spectacular savings for certain taxpayers who could pass some rather stringent conditions.
  2. Tax competition.  It has long been a government ambition for our country to be a place which is seen as “open for business”: where multi-nationals want to base their headquarters because the tax rates are low and the tax authorities are sympathetic souls who will understand.  The government now wants to extend this to individual taxpayers.  Tax competitiveness is for the many, not just for the few, is the slogan out front of some rather interesting proposals.  Essentially anyone with income over £50,000 a year will be eligible to register to vote in any constituency, not just the one in which they happen to reside.  They will be taxed on their income, using the Scottish Income Tax model, on a variable rate depending on their constituency.  Constituencies will be able to offer competitive tax rates via a new organisation led by Lord Gerry of Mander which will assess the likelihood of new voters changing the balance of power, although I have to say it is not entirely clear from the consultation document whether altering it is considered a good or bad thing!
  3. Tax simplification.  There’s a rather interesting proposal from the Office of Tax Simplification that would reduce the length of the tax code considerably.  In essence, it’s a new application of the “one in, two out” principle that applies to regulatory measures.  How it will work for tax is, however, quite markedly different, if the proposals are legislated in accordance with today’s consultation.  The lead proposal is to cap the tax code at its present length and reduce it by two pages for every page of new legislation introduced.  The clever part, however, is that the creeping repeal of existing legislation is done on a very simple brute-force basis.  If a Finance Act adds one page of new legislation to the “end” of the tax code, it simply repeals the first two pages from the “front” end.  If each new Finance Act introduces no more than fifty pages of new legislation at a time, the entire tax code will be down to nothing by 2356!

Posted in Bit of politics, Look at the date | 1 Comment »

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Tax simplification and the post office solution

March 21, 2016

Have you renewed your passport recently?  If you have, you may have used the “check and send” service at the Post Office, where you pay £9.75 for post office staff to check it:

Pop in before 5.30pm and our counter staff will make sure you’ve filled in all the right boxes, signed the right sections, have the right documentation and that your photos are suitable.

They don’t guarantee that you will get a passport, but they do give you assurance that you’ve ticked the right boxes, written stuff in the right place, and met all the fiddly rules about what you can and can’t do in the photograph.

Why am I telling you about all this?  Because I have given up thinking that HMRC has any interest in (or, to be fair, any funding for) its customer service offering to the simmers – SIHMRs – taxpayers with Small Incomes and High Marginal Rates, an acronym I coined in this article on accountingweb.

Because, honestly, what accounting firm is going to want to check the tax returns – or will they even make tax returns? – check the tax position of people with income covered by the personal, savings, dividend, digital trading, property, rent a room allowances, when they have capital gains under 11k and a bit of gift aid?  They can’t go into a tax office any more.  They will often be the people who are digitally excluded (but even if they aren’t, does anyone have a calculator that will give them the right answer?)  But they aren’t going to want to phone HMRC, when HMRC will just give them the standard line that it’s their responsibility to get it right and everything they need to know is on the website.

What these people will need, I argue, is assurance.  Someone who will tell them, yes, you’ve not made enough to need to pay tax.  No, you don’t need to contact HMRC unless X happens.  Yes, you can tick the gift aid box as long as you don’t donate more than £x in this year.

Who will do that?

What the SIHMRs will need, I reckon, is a nice friendly equivalent of the Post Office “check and send” service.  Most of them would be happy to pay £9.75 for a piece of paper which says, yes, you did it right.

So.  Who’s going to step up and organise the service?  HMRC?  If you’re listening, how about some seed money to set it up?  Will someone like Tax Help for Older People, LITRG or Taxaid step in?  Could Citizens Advice offer it on a self funding basis?  I don’t know.  But someone has to do something, or there are going to be a lot of confused and angry people finding the “simpler” tax system more complex than the complex kind.

 

Posted in Bit of politics, HMRC | 2 Comments »

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Clearing the decks

March 15, 2016

It’s the day before the Budget. You would think that HMRC and the Treasury would have cleared the decks ready for the raft of new measures presumably coming towards us after the speech.

So I was rather surprised when a quick check of the “open consultations” tab on the gov.uk website brought up one outstanding HMRC consultation and four for the treasury.

The HMRC one is mildly interesting: “a consultation on the control of tobacco manufacturing equipment and possible licensing of those involved in the supply chain for tobacco products.” Woah, you might think: we’re going to have licensed tobacconists??? Turns out from reading the consultation document that there are already arrangements in place for tobacconists in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to be registered: the issue for most of us will, I imagine, be how to get an equivalent process in place for England without on the one hand opening up a market in cross border arbitrage and on the other slapping an enormous administrative burden on some relatively marginal small businesses.

The four Treasury ones? The first two: Reforms to the investment bank special administration regime and Insurance linked securities are Letwin consultations. By Letwin consultations I am of course referring to Oliver Letwin’s explanation that the point of consultation isn’t to get “views” but to look for unintended consequences. No-one at the Treasury cares what you or I think about the investment bank special administration regime or about index linked securities. What they want from the consultation is for investment banks, accountancy bodies and major law firms to do some work for them on whether their proposals – whatever they are – work at all, work as intended, and will pass through parliament without annoying lobbying from the industries affected.

I sort of feel that, as this started as a blog looking at consultations, I really ought to read both consultation documents and attempt to form a view whether they are good proposals. I feel, however, that a Letwin consultation is designed to induce somnolence in the general reader, and I just don’t care enough today to even try, sorry.

I will reserve my indignation for the other two Treasury consultations. If you have the time and the inclination, I recommend looking at this one: the proposal to create a National Infrastructure Commission, or at least to put the “shadow” one that has already been set up onto a statutory footing.

This consultation closes on Thursday night (11.45pm 17th March) and asks, in effect, if we think it’s OK that the Treasury sets up a quango – sorry, that’s not politically correct these days, is it? Now we call them “non-departmental public bodies”. The Treasury will set up an NDPB which will produce a National Infrastructure Assessment (NIA) and do we agree that a GDP envelope would provide the most effective fiscal remit for the commission…

Can we imagine the post-war Attlee government setting up the National Health Service like this? The National Health Infrastructure Board would still be holding meetings to decide whether the GDP funding envelope would allow them to start building a hospital at some point in the not too distant future, if the existing providers didn’t mind too much and the government accepted their latest Health Infrastructure Advisory Report…

And the final Treasury consultation? They want to make public sector exit payments “fairer, more modern and more consistent”. In other words, they want to get rid of huge swathes of the civil service and they don’t want to pay the going rate for doing so. What? You thought any of those weasel words meant that they were suggesting consistent or modern fairness to their workers?

Posted in Bit of politics, Consultation, HMRC, HMT | 2 Comments »

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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 »

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Views

January 27, 2016

You couldn’t make it up.  Or perhaps you could: the Daily Telegraph seems to be the only source for the news item at present so perhaps they had a testing-the-waters quote from the Minister responsible or someone in his office, because of course a respectable news source wouldn’t make up something like this.

Like what?  Well, it seems the BBC Charter Review consultation had over 190,000 responses – you’d think that would be a cause for celebration, but, no!  It’s not fair, says the government, apparently.  When we said “public consultation” we weren’t expecting mere opinions from mere members of the public, obviously!  We’ve had to take on extra staff to read them!  It cost us actual money! (And won’t the Freedom of Information Act requests for details of who, where from and how much they were paid be interesting!)

They needed an extra 25 staff?  For three months?  and – if we are to believe the Daily Telegraph –

it has taken more than 10,000 man-hours to count the submissions

Here’s a tip: if it takes you ten thousand “man-hours” just to count the responses, you’re doing it wrong.  They came in electronically – I know, I responded.  Computers can count stuff like that much faster than people.  Maybe, I don’t know, employ some women next time???

Posted in Bit of politics, Consultation | Leave a Comment »

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Google’s “Minor Tax Deal”

January 23, 2016

For once the headline says it all: Google Strikes Minor Tax Deal with UK Authorities.  Essentially it seems that Google has announced they’ve reached a settlement with HMRC (the timing is interesting: who decided to put it into the news cycle today?) They appear to have closed a six year enquiry covering ten years of activity by agreeing to pay an extra £130 million.

So roughly £13m a year?  (Are there any amounts in there for interest and penalties, I wonder?)

The point is, the amount is trivial in comparison with Google’s sales in the UK.  It’s one of the issues Margaret Hodge’s PAC did a lot of work on: remember this?

To avoid UK corporation tax, Google relies on the deeply unconvincing argument that its sales to UK clients take place in Ireland, despite clear evidence that the vast majority of sales activity takes place in the UK.

There are two changes that, in my view, need to be made.  First of all, if what the PAC found was in fact the case, then there was actual evasion rather than avoidance involved.  If there was “clear evidence” of evasion then we should have been looking at “perp walks” and prosecutions, not at a financial settlement.  Presumably there wasn’t, or there would have been, right?  I mean, right??  I assume Google weren’t guilty of evasion but HMRC need to be careful of the perception that evaders can get away with it if they’re big enough.  A way out of that perception would be for HMRC to be more ambitious about prosecutions: where are the large cases that involve direct tax, rather than the “quick wins” from smuggled fags?

Secondly, there are the usual calls for tax to be “simplified” so that people pay their “fair share”.  Quite.  Except this usually also falls into the mire of the citizen stakeholder asking for simplicity and fairness, and the tax professional saying it’s not so simple, and what is fairness anyway.

I have a suggestion how to get around that.  Episode two of the The Town that Took On The Tax Authorities.  Give me a budget, a camera crew and a bunch of engaged small traders like the people of Crickhowell.  And let’s see what happens…

Posted in Bit of politics, Equality, HMRC | Leave a Comment »

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O Canada!

January 8, 2016

Now if you ask me, this is how you do a consultation!  The Canadian authorities start now, with an accessible invitation to citizens to come on board with their thoughts as to what should be in their next Budget.  (Hat tip to Jill Rutter at the Institute for Government for the original mention on twitter:

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You might also like to look at her old blog post commenting on the adequacy of our own dear Treasury’s “budget suggestions portal”)

Because, actually, who has a right to be involved in the conversation about tax? If you are a regular reader of this blog you can probably guess my answer: we have.  We, the citizens, the tax muggles, the taxpayers, have a right to take part in the conversation about tax; it’s not a topic that should only be addressed by “experts”.

What has wound me up about the topic today?  This consultation about the tax deductibility of corporate interest expense.  It closes on 14th January: I was going to make it my first consultation response of the year, and then I thought I might not bother, and then I skimmed the first few paragraphs, and then I got

r e a l l y   a n g r y…

Here’s the rubric on the consultation page:

This consultation will look at:

the key aspects of the OECD recommendations regarding best practices in the design of rules to prevent base erosion through the use of interest expense
how specific issues could be addressed in a UK domestic policy context.
This consultation is open until 14 January and the government will consider responses in the development of a future business tax roadmap.

OK, so we know the government is developing this “business tax roadmap” (because business needs “certainty” about tax, whereas the rest of us will be happy with the usual government mess of making it up as they go along?)  And I’d heard of BEPS – the base erosion and profit shifting project – which is one of the things that I vaguely meant to get on top of one day, but essentially is the international project (in the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development – OECD) to stop multinationals from pretending they have to pay all their income from selling you (say) coffee in (say) Sheffield to some corporate knowledge bank in (as it might be) The Netherlands, because no-one else knows how to make coffee…

Now I thought David Cameron was all in favour of BEPS – that the UK was setting the agenda and taking the lead...

Which is why I’m a bit surprised that

we are publishing this document now to seek views from all stakeholders on how best to respond to the OECD proposals. We are interested in the views of all stakeholders on how to address BEPS issues involving interest expense in an effective and proportionate manner. The results from this consultation will be considered in the development of a future business tax roadmap. [David Gauke’s introduction to the consultation document]

“Effective” and “proportionate” are, I imagine, code words for “impotent” and “ineffective”?

To me this looks like an attempt to take the principles that tax justice campaigners have worked for – ending the erosion of the tax base, ending profit shifting to tax havens, introducing country by country reporting – and letting the poachers work out the rules of engagement that will bind the gamekeepers.

Look at the slide set from the “stakeholder event” held on 14th December last year.

(Incidentally, one of the objectives of the day was

  • To encourage and facilitate constructive written responses to the public consultation

because god forbid we should get unauthorised muggles giving their views!)

You will see from the first page of notes (after slide 16) that there is a description of the “stakeholders” attending the meeting.

There were 73 representatives from a wide range of business sectors including manufacturing, retail, services, oil and gas, utilities, telecoms, publishing, infrastructure, real estate, banking, insurance, and fund management, as well as from accountancy and legal firms, regulators, trade associations, civil society organisations and academia.

Now: who in that list represents you?  What stakeholder was protecting the interest of the ordinary taxpaying citizen?

Perhaps it would be easier to look at the list of the actual organisations represented:

Association of British Insurers (ABI)

Action Aid

Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME)

American International Group (AIG)

Alternative Investment Management Association (AIMA)

Allen & Overy

Alvarez & Marsal

Amazon

Anglican Water Group

Anglo American

Asos

Association of Investment Companies (AIC)

Association of Real Estate Funds (AREF)

BAE Systems

Baker & Mckenzie

Balfour Beatty

Barclays

British Bankers’ Association (BBA)

BDO

Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) Monitoring Group

BG Group

BHP Biliton

BP

British Property Federation (BPF)

British Land Corporation

BT

Confederation of British Industry (CBI)

Chartered Institute of Taxation (CIOT)

Deloitte

Diageo

Disney

Duff and Phelps

Evans Property Group

EY

Ford

Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer

G4S

General Electric (GE)

Grant Thornton

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)

Heathrow

HSBC

Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland (ICAS)

Informa

InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG)

Investment Association

Investment Property Forum

Johnson Matthey

KPMG

Liberty Global

London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

Microsoft

National Grid

Nomura

Norton Rose Fulbright

Ofwat

Oxfam

Pearson

Pinsent Masons

Prudential

PwC

Rolls Royce

RSM

Santander

Severn Trent

Shell

Slaughter & May

Tesco

Unilever

United Utilities

Vodafone

XL

(incidentally I make that 72 and not 73)

Now, if I had been David Gauke, I would have had a few select financial journalists in for a chat and made it clear that we were looking to be, and to stay, at the forefront of the BEPS project and tried to get them excited about the idea of a proper consultation, with taxpaying citizens and not just the Usual Suspects.  And then I would have emulated the Canadians and organised a google hangout and a webpage and a hashtag and a Facebook page and an appearance on Jeremy Vine and…

I’d have asked us.

It would have taken some explaining what the question was, but I don’t for a moment believe that the taxpaying public is incapable of understanding the question nor uninterested in the answer.

Who’s for a google hangout to thrash out a Muggles’ Charter?  The government wants to “encourage and facilitate constructive written responses” so let’s answer the call.

Posted in Bit of politics, Consultation, Tax Justice | Leave a Comment »

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Weasels

January 1, 2016

Happy New Year!  Before we leave 2015 behind us altogether, can we just cast our minds back for a moment to the Autumn Statement and Spending Review and how much fun we all had playing Buzzword Bingo?  There are some words and phrases (hard working families; back office, efficiency savings) that make me want to reach for Goering’s gun, mainly because they are weasel words and phrases.  “Hard working families” means “you: nice people who have jobs and vote for us, and not them: nasty people you’ve never met and who claim benefits”.  “Back office” means “people who we think we can get rid of without making any difference, because everyone else will have just work harder for no extra pay to do their own typing and make their own travel bookings”.  And of course “efficiency savings” mean “cuts”. Well, I think I’ve found another weasel.  Look here: the Civil Service blog about what the spending review means for the service.  Apparently we must “modernise”.  Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?  Throw away the fountain pens and the carbon paper and get with the 21st century.  Who could argue with that? Well no, apparently what needs to be modernised is civil servants’ “terms and conditions, to bring them more into line with those in the private sector”.  Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve never had a job where you take home less money in one year than you did the previous year.  But if I hadn’t left HMRC when I did, that would have happened.  The combination of flat pay and rising deductions means that many of my former colleagues are literally taking home less than they did last year. It’s hard to have sympathy for someone on a 50K salary, do I hear you say?  Well of course it is, if you’re going to work on the principle that no-one should have cake till everyone has bread.  Me, I think there are enough resources in the world for everyone to have bread AND roses, and if some people have neither that’s because of political decisions.  But, to put it mildly, you are hardly going to encourage your brightest and best to consider public service if that’s how you are going to treat them. There is a lot of talk about the “covenant” between the country and the armed forces.  And, at the risk of going into old git mode (I seriously found myself considering typing the phrase “in my day”) I was always led to believe there was a “covenant”, an agreement, perhaps not a written contract but a gentleman’s agreement, between the civil service and the government, and in particular between the Tax Inspector and the government. We want you – in effect, it said – to be the watchdog on people with substantial fortunes.  We won’t pay you silly money, but we’ll pay you a middle class salary and give you decent terms and conditions, and we’ll see you right with a decent pension at the end of your service.  You might make more money on the Other Side, but you’ll make Enough in public service and you’ll know you’re on the side of righteousness. What changed during my career?  The naked contempt of the privileged for the poor sap who thinks public service is more important than (or even as important as) making money. So now we can look forward to a future where there is no longer a local branch network of HMRC offices, but a few mega structures and a computerised system.  Rather in the way that my bank helpfully centralised by closing all but one of its branches in Sheffield, and then sacked all the staff in the one remaining branch and replaced them with a wall of machines. Why should we care?  I was trying to think of something hopeful to say – a traditional New Year’s Day message of, well, things will be different but it’ll be all right in the end.  After all Lin Homer shall have her Damehood “for public service particularly to Public Finance.” (page 5) and we shall all have a Personal Tax Account. But honestly, I can’t really think of anything hopeful to say, sorry.  After all, it’s a commonplace now in HMRC management that “there are 22 professions in HMRC, not just tax.”  So presumably once the last tax professional has given up the ghost and joined the other side HMRC as an entity can just … do something else?

Posted in Bit of politics, HMRC | Leave a Comment »

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