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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 »

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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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Crickhowell: the town that went offshore

January 22, 2016

“Either we all pay tax, or none of us do!”

There are just three things I want to say about The Town That Took on the Taxman, the show originally trailed as the “Town that Went Offshore“.  I missed it when it was on BBC2 (9pm on Wednesday 20th) but caught up with it on iplayer.  If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend doing the same.

First of all, I enjoyed it enormously.  We have seen the same material before: the production team fancies a quick weekend somewhere sunny so they pick their tax havens carefully.  Oh look, there are supposed to be thousands of companies in that little house with all the brass plates on the door… Yes, but this time the explanation of the Dutch Sandwich avoidance scheme was done by ordinary small traders from the Welsh town of Crickhowell.

Which is, really, my second point.  Arise, tax muggles!  The USP for this programme was that the avoidance scheme was devised and operated by a group of ordinary people, not tax specialists.  Crickhowell is, apparently, a small town with a unique high street ecology made up of local small traders, not multinational chains (except for Boots, who at least they managed to shame into joining in with the Christmas lights).  But by the end of the show they were also tax campaigners.

The production team set them up with meetings with tax professionals who explained how multinationals reduce their corporation tax bills with items like payments for intellectual property.  But it seems to have been the small traders themselves who came up with the idea of creating intellectual property in the form of the Fair Tax Town brand and then parking it in the Isle of Mann company they’d opened.

In other words, tax really doesn’t have to be taxing: ordinary people are perfectly able to understand tax schemes and issues when they are motivated to understand them and have someone able to communicate with them clearly.  HMRC’s stakeholder model involves talking to “stakeholder” groups: usually to tax professionals in accountancy and law firms and those employed by industry groups.  What they need to do, in my view, is talk to small traders like the Crickhowell independents, too.  One of the main grievances the group raised with Jim Harra was, indeed, the HMRC “relationship managers” large businesses have and why aren’t small traders treated to the same level of customer service.  Money, is the simple answer.  But it’s also an excuse: HMRC’s customer service offering needs a really good re-think in my view.  Good on the Crickhowell team if they can disrupt the system enough to get that done.  (And, bring back the Small Firms Impact Test!)

Finally, the elephant in the room.  You didn’t notice?  Well, there was an engaging team of Crickhowellians throughout the programme, men and women, so I suppose you could be forgiven.  But the presenter’s constant reference to “the taxman” grated, and made me notice. That they spoke to tax barrister David Quentin, investigative journalist Tom Bergin, author of The Great Tax Robbery Richard Brooks, Jim Harra, an actual taxman, sceptical voice Richard Murphy , tax barrister Jolson Maugham…

You see the common thread? #wherearethewomen?  It’s not as if Women in Tax are hard to find!

Posted in Avoidance, Equality, SFIT | 1 Comment »

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Vision on

January 12, 2016

How did “making tax digital” become “quarterly tax returns“?

Seriously, prepopulating tax returns, making them like a digital bank account and doing away with the annual return deadline is a brilliant idea and a great ambition for a twenty-first century tax department.  So how come the Treasury select committee is writing to David Gauke asking for assurances it won’t be a cock up, and how come there’s a petition with more than a hundred thousand signatures (the Magic Number that gets it considered for Parliamentary debate) asking for the idea to be scrapped, before the consultation has even started?

Well, first of all, HMRC is utterly crap at communicating with the very smallest small businesses, as anyone who has listened to me banging on about the VATMOSS VATMESS over the last year will know.  The “stakeholder” model breaks down when there isn’t a “stakeholder” group to talk to, and the very smallest traders don’t join trade associations because even the Federation of Small Businesses costs more to join than the likely profits.

There’s an alternative (the Small Firms Impact Test, which again I’ve banged on about in this blog once in a while) but (a) it costs money and (b) the government abolished it in favour of a vague requirement which adds up more or less to “Think about small businesses.  Are you thinking?  Good.  You can stop now.”

Secondly, HMRC is acquiring a serious reputation for being crap at customer service.  They have closed down the customer contact centres, they are appalling at answering their phones, and they keep getting caught trying to “nudge” our behaviour (and no-one likes to know they’re being manipulated)  So when something new is announced – as it might be, the closure of the national network of tax offices – and any negative feedback is ignored, the belief grows that HMRC is unresponsive to the people it works for, the ordinary taxpaying citizen.

The announcement of the move to digital tax accounts was trailed as the “end of the tax return”.  It was a Budget announcement, one of those surprise moves that you wonder about.  Was the Chancellor sitting there the weekend before the Budget listening to his Malcolm Tucker going, no, this won’t do: there’s nothing hot here: bring me something sexy?  Or is there someone in the HMRC or HMT hierarchy with an actual vision of how tax is going to work in the future and did they get their plan shuffled to the top of the pile?

The point is, it’s a good idea and it just might work. But not without someone articulating the vision and getting the public on board.

What happened, here, to the stage one consultation?  Remember? The 2011 Tax Consultation Framework?  Has it been abolished or is there still a legitimate expectation that there will be “early and continuing engagement” starting with

Stage One: Setting out objectives and identifying options

What would I have done differently?  Announced the objective of making HMRC

more effective, more efficient and easier for taxpayers

and identifying options that included abolishing tax returns, providing prepopulated electronic tax accounts, and moving to a fully digital system.

And then I’d have asked the taxpayers.  A charm offensive with journalists, a few quid bunged to some academics to organise some citizen juries, a dozen HMRC broadcasters retasked to add speech-making to the WI and the Soroptimists and the Lions and all those other organisations that people listen to and where they talk about stuff.

You know.  Made a preliminary stage consultation where you could demonstrate you were actually living up to your own processes and listening to your “customers”; and so you might have half a chance of persuading them you were proposing a change for the better, for once.  Trust me, I’m from the tax office.  That ought to be a slogan.  And not a joke.

 

 

Posted in Consultation, Digital, HMRC | 2 Comments »

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A radical idea…

January 11, 2016

…but it just might work.  Next time, let’s try having a tax professional at the head of HMRC?

Bear with me.  Today we saw the announcement that Lin Homer – sorry, Dame Lin Homer – is to leave HMRC in April.  This explains the “lately” mention in the announcement of her honour:

Ms Linda Margaret HOMER, CB

Lately Chief Executive, HM Revenue and Customs. For public service particularly to Public Finance.

People had been speculating on that “lately” for a while, and now we know.  (And, incidentally, has anyone been able to get a reasonable response from HMRC’s Press Office lately?  They seem to have cut back on staff so far that you have to be from someone Really Really Important before they have the capacity to get back to you.)

Now, opinions may differ on Homer’s legacy.  In the current climate you could well argue that still *having* a department is enough of a victory for any public servant (every now and then some oddball tweets me that it’s outrageous that HMRC hasn’t got any commercial competition.  There’s a whole other blog entry on the biblical “tax collector” and why they were thought to be evil, being outsourced collectors who took a cut of as much as they could get away with screwing out of you…)  Yes, there is still an HMRC, it’s still staffed (mostly) by public servants, they still (mostly) get (sort of) reasonable-ish terms and conditions, considering, and they still do the best they can in a department which isn’t corrupt in a system which hasn’t (yet) developed a reputation for corruption.

Damning with faint praise?  Maybe.  It doesn’t look much, when you look at it from that point of view, but in the current climate she probably did a pretty good job.  It’s just… well, you know.  The management-speak when there was any kind of internal challenge (yes, the leadership and managing change section of the HMRC Staff Survey is worth another look – ouch!).  The combative appearances before select committees.  The usual government-speak of statistics in verb-free public-speaking sentence fragments.

Was she the right person, in the right job at the right time?  Well, hindsight is easy, but does anyone have a different and more to the point better candidate in mind?

The important thing is, what comes next.  Angela Knight is now head of the Office of Tax Simplification.  The next person to head HMRC needs to be, I’m afraid, everything Angela Knight is not.  They need – in my view, anyway – to be a tax professional, so that they can talk to the tax industry and to their own tax professionals and command respect.  They also need to have, or at any rate quickly to achieve, a high profile with the wider taxpaying public, the muggles, so that the dangerous view that “they’re all the same” doesn’t become embedded in the British tax administration.  And they need to be able to manage a department which, ten years ago, was created out of two different departments by the simple method of putting them all into one black box and letting the strongest survive.  After the Darwinian winnowing that resulted, HMRC’s management now needs to be conducted on a rational basis, by someone who understands that there may be “22 professions in HMRC” but it’s the results achieved by the tax profession on which they will, ultimately, be judged.

Do I have a candidate in mind?

Not a scooby, sorry!  And it was all going so well…

 

Posted in 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?

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