tiintax

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!

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.