Is there any limit to HMRC’s idleness, incompetence and contempt for the public? We ask after a recent conversation with an old acquaintance, a retired tax specialist, who told of his experience of making a submission to the HMRC’s whistle blowing facility through its website.
Year by year the Government spends more and more money on HMRC’s activities justifying doing so on the basis that each pound spent raises many pounds in tax revenue as though extracting money from the productive economy is necessarily of benefit to the King’s subjects regardless of on what it is spent. With eye-watering sums of money being spent it is surely not too much to expect that HMRC will at least collect the taxes which are due with reasonable efficiency and with due regard to the value of the time of those members of the public who help its work out of a spirit of public duty.
Our acquaintance had become aware of the likelihood that an individual, abetted by his solicitor, had made a false return and boasted about doing so, resulting in an underpayment of tax of almost £1 million. Our acquaintance decided to report the matter to HMRC using the whistle blowing facility on its website. We strongly believe that every taxpayer has a duty to be honest in his dealings with HMRC but we confess that we should not ourselves have acted as our acquaintance did unless we had been under a legal or professional duty to do so. Nonetheless, we respected the sense of public duty which prompted his action.
He accessed the facility on HMRC’s website for reporting ‘tax fraud and avoidance’ which claims to be confidential. Concerned about the adequacy of HMRC’s protection of taxpayer confidentiality he did not wish to give his identity and the facility allowed him to withhold it.
There wasn’t any useful information at the beginning of the process as to what was involved in making a report but our acquaintance assumed that it would be possible to submit a document to HMRC setting out the matters concerned in sufficient detail for HMRC to take action in respect of it. He composed a document identifying the parties involved, their actions and omissions, the relevant legislation, the application of that legislation to those acts and omissions and his reasons for thinking that the return contained a deliberate understatement of a tax liability.
Short of himself opening an enquiry for HMRC there was not much more that our acquaintence could have done for it to make its work easier.
When he got towards the end of the online submission process, however, he found that he could not attach his document and that he was allowed only 1,200 characters of text to specify the matters which were the subject of the report. What tax matter of any complexity could be adequately described in 200 – 300 words?
Our acquaintance, therefore, rang the relevant telephone number given on the website. The first thing he heard was a recorded statement that all calls were recorded. When, after a wait of some ten minutes, he eventually spoke to an individual he was told that there was indeed no facility to submit documents through the online disclosure facility, no facility for them to be submitted to HMRC in any other way and no way of submitting text of more than 1,200 characters. He suggested that as the call was being recorded, he could simply read out the paper which he had written. The respondent did not know whether this was possible and said that he would have to transfer our acquaintance to a ‘specialist’. Fifty minutes later he was transferred to this ‘specialist’.
The ‘specialist’ said that the call was not being recorded in spite of the recorded message which had been played to our acquaintance at the start of his call but that the ‘specialist’ would take down notes of the matter. The ‘specialist’ seemed to be unacquainted with the simplest matters of taxation, to be unable to recognise that a reference was a reference to statute or to understand the importance of statutory references. He asked, apparently reading from a script, a series of questions of no relevance to the matter in hand.
Our acquaintance regularly asked the ‘specialist’ to summarise what he had been told and was alarmed to find that the summary was full of misunderstandings and inaccuracies. Our acquaintance did his very best to correct these errors so as to ensure that the correct information was recorded but at the end of the conversation he felt no confidence that it had been. The ’specialist’ refused to acknowledge that a process which cannot accept documents prepared by the public, keeps those public spirited enough to expend their time in helping HMRC do the job for which its staff are paid on the telephone for over an hour when they could have submitted a document describing the matter in a few seconds had an appropriate facility been provided and results in a garbled summary of the matter in hand being recorded when a precise statement of it might have been obtained might be improved in any way.
Our acquaintance is unlikely again to spend several hours of his time in helping HMRC to perform its supposed function of collecting tax which is legally due.
We are sure that none of our regular readers will engage in tax evasion but if any tax evaders chance upon this post they will no doubt be very much encouraged. Those of us who are honest taxpayers will be appalled that HMRC has created a process of such obvious inadequacy that it is clear that it is losing the opportunity to recover large sums of unpaid tax and that the taxes which it does collect are being wasted on the salaries of Government officials of such breath-taking incompetence and disregard for the public they are supposed to serve.
