Dedicated to the taxpayers of Britain, and the employees of His Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC), who have to endure the monumental shambles that is HMRC.
Adam Afriyie is facing bankruptcy proceedings over unpaid taxes. Court
records show a petition for bankruptcy has been filed by HMRC against
the MP,
His IT firm went into insolvency in 2017 apparently due to a £1.7million tax debt
Under parliamentary rules MPs
have to stand down if they are declared bankrupt.
A spokesperson for
Afriyie says:
“The petition arises for complex reasons related to Adam’s
past business interests.
Negotiations have been ongoing for several
years and the petition is subject to legal challenge as his advisers are
working towards reaching an agreement.”
Having a Solar Protect Tax Investigation Insurance policy at your disposal means that should you be one of the many 1000's of businesses or individuals that are selected by HMRC each year to look into your tax affairs your own accountant (your tax return agent) can get on and defend you robustly.
You have the peace of mind knowing that your accountant's (your tax return agent) fees will be paid by the insurance without any Excess for you to find.
Tax Investigation Insurance is an insurance policy that will fully
reimburse your accountants (your tax return agent) fees up to £100,000
if you are subject to enquiry by or dispute with HMRC.
A Solar Protect policy will enable your Accountant (your tax return agent) to:
Deal with any correspondence from HMRC
Attend any meeting with HMRC
Appeal to the First-tier Tribunal or Upper Tribunal
Having the security of knowing that fees will be met in full will
enable your Accountant (your tax return agent) to defend your position
robustly
Bear in mind that this real time adjustment is only for underpayments, taxpayers who are overpaying because of an erroneous tax code will have to wait.
Why?
The government is bankrupt, and HMRC's stated objective is to maximise revenue!
Tax does have to be taxing.
Professional Cover Against the Threat of Costly TAX and VAT Investigations
Insurance to protect you against the cost of enquiry or dispute with HMRC is available from several sources including Solar Tax Investigation Insurance.
Ken Frost has negotiated a 10% discount on any polices that may suit your needs.
However, neither Ken Frost nor HMRCISSHITE either endorses or recommends their services.
Solar Tax Investigation Insurance is a tax-fee protection service that will pay up to £75,000 towards your accountant's fees in the event of an HM Revenue & Customs full enquiry or dispute.
As per the Guardian Patrick Cullinane's life has been ruined by the Inland Revenue. The
government department has bankrupted him, kicked him out of his home,
and driven him to a mental breakdown. His brothers and sisters have
walked away from him and he has been unable to find work.
His crime? You might think he had committed a major white-collar tax
fraud or an offshore scam depriving the Revenue of millions. But Mr
Cullinane was simply an ordinary working man, earning around £18,000 a
year in the 1980s largely as a casual in the film industry.
Mr Cullinane's case is so disturbing that this week Barry Gardiner, the
MP for Brent North, says he will be calling for an adjournment debate in
the House of Commons questioning the "governance" of the Inland Revenue
and its ability to investigate complaints made by taxpayers.
Read the full account of HMRC's dirty tricks via the Guardian link.
Tax does have to be taxing.
Professional Cover Against the Threat of Costly TAX and VAT Investigations
Insurance to protect you against the cost of enquiry or dispute with HMRC is available from several sources including Solar Tax Investigation Insurance.
Ken Frost has negotiated a 10% discount on any polices that may suit your needs.
However, neither Ken Frost nor HMRCISSHITE either endorses or recommends their services.
Solar Tax Investigation Insurance is a tax-fee protection service that will pay up to £75,000 towards your accountant's fees in the event of an HM Revenue & Customs full enquiry or dispute.
A study by R3 (the insolvency trade body) has found that 54% of insolvency practitioners (IPs)
think that HMRC makes it harder to rescue businesses rather than wind them up.
The survey also highlighted that 71% of IPs believe that HMRC has made the
insolvency process harder to manage over the past few years, with just
10% believing that HMRC was ‘helpful' when it comes to business
rescue.
IPs estimate that a
third of the estimated 480,000 letters and forms they send to HMRC
for a year's worth of cases are duplicates of lost or ignored post, or
are copies of letters that have to be sent to multiple HMRC addresses.
This is the equivalent to approximately 160,000 excess forms and letters
for a year's worth of new cases.
Some 54% of insolvency practitioners reported that they had to wait
over three months for clearance from HMRC to close their last case,
while 25% waited between six months and a year.
43% said their requests for information from HMRC -
to which they were entitled as office holders - were rejected.
Phillip Sykes, president of R3,
is quoted by AccountancyAge:
"The government, as a creditor, can do much more to help promote a
business rescue culture. At the moment, it can be responsible for
lengthy paperwork delays, and creates extra costs for itself, the
insolvency profession and other creditors, while its lack of commercial
decision-making capabilities undermines business and job rescue
proposals.
The insolvency profession believes the government's behaviour as a
creditor makes it harder to manage insolvency processes and rescue
businesses. It's one of the creditors the insolvency profession looks
forward to working with the least - which is a problem given how often
the government is a creditor in insolvencies."
What Mr Sykes doesn't grasp is that the government does not give a flying fig for businesses, unless they are multinationals giving the government a large scale discounted contract or providing jobs for ex government ministers.
Tax does have to be taxing.
Professional Cover Against the Threat of Costly TAX and VAT Investigations
Insurance to protect you against the cost of enquiry or dispute with HMRC is available from several sources including Solar Tax Investigation Insurance.
Ken Frost has negotiated a 10% discount on any polices that may suit your needs.
However, neither Ken Frost nor HMRCISSHITE either endorses or recommends their services.
Solar Tax Investigation Insurance is a tax-fee protection service that will pay up to £75,000 towards your accountant's fees in the event of an HM Revenue & Customs full enquiry or dispute.
The FT reports that approximatley £170m owed to unsecured creditors in collapsed mobile phone retailer Phones4U will be almost entirely wiped out.
Unsecured creditors to the retail chain are owed about £168m but are
only likely to receive 0.4p for every pound, PwC said. These include HMRC, which is owed about £75m in VAT and corporation
tax.
However,
creditors who own Phones4U’s £430m worth of senior secured notes, which
are listed on the Irish stock exchange, “may recover” 20 per cent to 24
per cent of their money, as their debt ranks higher up the legal ladder
for repayment priority in an insolvency.
Tax does have to be taxing.
Professional Cover Against the Threat of Costly TAX and VAT Investigations
Insurance to protect you against the cost of enquiry or dispute with HMRC is available from several sources including Solar Tax Investigation Insurance.
Ken Frost has negotiated a 10% discount on any polices that may suit your needs.
However, neither Ken Frost nor HMRCISSHITE either endorses or recommends their services.
Solar Tax Investigation Insurance is a tax-fee protection service that will pay up to £75,000 towards your accountant's fees in the event of an HM Revenue & Customs full enquiry or dispute.
Data released by HMRC on Monday shows that the number of UK companies which HMRC sought to have wound up,
due to failure to pay tax, increased from 3,367 in tax year 2011 to 5,302 in tax year 2012 (an increase of 57%).
Why?
Wilkins Kennedy LLP are of the view that HMRC is being pressurised by the government to take a more hardline stance (in order to squeeze more tax revenue out of the system).
Anthony Cork, a partner at Wilkins Kennedy, is quoted by Tax-News:
"When businesses run
into trouble, often one of the first things they do is try to delay tax payments
to help manage their cashflow. This puts businesses on a collision course with
HMRC.
HMRC does not like being used as a 'lender of first resort,' and is keen
to dispel the image that it is a soft touch or that the unauthorised late payment
of taxes is an acceptable way for a business to resolve cash flow problems."
Cork is of the view that HMRC could intervene earlier to help businesses manage their tax bills:
"HMRC
often lets tax debts spiral out of control, which leaves it with little choice
but to resort to winding-up petitions to recover large amounts of unpaid taxes."
Cork also noted that it is now harder to receive help from HMRC's Time to Pay scheme.
Is this the case I wonder?
The fact that the companies were having problems with paying their taxes indicates that the businesses themselves were in trouble.
Was this trouble a "temporary blip" that could be resolved if the company was given more time, or was this a symptom of an underlying long term problem with the business?
It is not HMRC's role to act as a lender of last resort.
Businesses fail for many reasons, it is always easy to blame banks and creditors (eg HMRC) for pushing them under but it is not always right to lay the blame at the door of banks and creditors.
I would welcome input, views and comments from SME's, loyal readers etc which have asked for help from HMRC wrt delaying tax payment etc.
Tax does have to be taxing.
Professional Cover Against the Threat of Costly TAX and VAT Investigations
Insurance to protect you against the cost of enquiry or dispute with HMRC is available from several sources including Solar Tax Investigation Insurance.
Ken Frost has negotiated a 10% discount on any polices that may suit your needs.
However, neither Ken Frost nor HMRCISSHITE either endorses or recommends their services.
Solar Tax Investigation Insurance is a tax-fee protection service that will pay up to £75,000 towards your accountant's fees in the event of an HM Revenue & Customs full enquiry or dispute.
Tax Investigation for Dummies, by Nick Morgan, provides a good and easy to read guide for anyone caught up in an HMRC tax investigation. A must read for any Self Assessment taxpayer.
"Judge Lewison was astonished when one HMRC employee admitted that he had no
evidence that Abbey had been involved in fraud, but maintained that he had
no proof that it was not involved in criminal activity -- which, as the
judge pointed out, is not grounds in law for liquidating the company."
Tax does have to be taxing.
Professional Cover Against the Threat of Costly TAX and VAT Investigations
Insurance to protect you against the cost of enquiry or dispute with HMRC is available from several sources including Solar Tax Investigation Insurance.
Ken Frost has negotiated a 10% discount on any polices that may suit your needs.
However, neither Ken Frost nor HMRCISSHITE either endorses or recommends their services.
Solar Tax Investigation Insurance is a tax-fee protection service that will pay up to £75,000 towards your accountant's fees in the event of an HM Revenue & Customs full enquiry or dispute.
Tax Investigation for Dummies, by Nick Morgan, provides a good and easy to read guide for anyone caught up in an HMRC tax investigation. A must read for any Self Assessment taxpayer.
Here is an extract of a letter sent out by HMRC, chasing up overdue tax, as published in the Mail:
"Since I last wrote to you, most of those still owing tax have paid, making their contribution to the vital services we all depend on.
We still haven't received your tax payment, and my team are now focusing attention on the rapidly reducing number of people like you who have yet to pay. Not paying your tax on time has serious consequences. We must collect this tax from you to pay for the hospitals and schools we all rely on.
We will do that by taking your possessions and auctioning them publicly. We don't like doing this because people have told us it is embarrassing for them and it will cost you so much more to pay this way.
For instance, if your car is worth several thousand pounds, it might sell for only a few hundred pounds at auction, a flat-screen TV costing £2,000 would typically sell for about £200-£300, and an £800 laptop would sell for about £100.
To avoid this, please call one of my team on the number at the top of this letter to pay by debit or credit card. Some people who have a problem paying their tax bury their head in the sand. In fact, many people find that speaking to us helps."
George Mudie, deputy chairman of the Commons Treasury committee, is unimpressed with this and intends to raise the issue with George Osborne.
Quote:
"It is not for the Revenue to behave like thuggish bailiffs threatening to seize people's property. It is inappropriate and immoral to use such threatening, harassing language."
Tax does have to be taxing.
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TAXWISE is a tax-fee protection service that will pay up to £75,000 towards your accountant's fees in the event of an HM Revenue & Customs full enquiry or dispute.
Tax Investigation for Dummies, by Nick Morgan, provides a good and easy to read guide for anyone caught up in an HMRC tax investigation. A must read for any Self Assessment taxpayer.
TAXWISE is a tax-fee protection service that will pay up to £75,000 towards your accountant's fees in the event of an HM Revenue & Customs full enquiry or dispute.
Tax Investigation for Dummies, by Nick Morgan, provides a good and easy to read guide for anyone caught up in an HMRC tax investigation. A must read for any Self Assessment taxpayer.
One of my loyal readers asked why the Private Eye story about Robert Bowering being employed by HMRC, in spite of the fact that he was bankrupted by HMRC and still owes them money, was not front page news.
TAXWISE is a tax-fee protection service that will pay up to £75,000 towards your accountant's fees in the event of an HM Revenue & Customs full enquiry or dispute.
Tax Investigation for Dummies, by Nick Morgan, provides a good and easy to read guide for anyone caught up in an HMRC tax investigation. A must read for any Self Assessment taxpayer.
Private Eye have an interesting report about the manager of HMRC's East Kilbride call centre (Robert Bowering).
Seemingly, before being appointed in June 2009, he had been made bankrupt (to the tune of £75K) by...errmmm...HMRC!
Sadly for HMRC it has been deemed unlikely that they will ever recover one penny of this.
How did he get his job (paid at higher than the normal rate) then?
Easy, he is friends with HMRC's director of contact centres, Linda Maslen. They were even linked on Faecesbook, until the Eye started looking into it!
Impressive isn't it?
Have no fear though, HMRC told the Eye that "correct procedures had been followed".
It saddens me to see that there are a number of people attracted to working for the state, and its many organs, who like to hide behind "procedures" when anything goes wrong.
These people are effectively brain dead, and are incapable of intuitive/creative thought or acting with initiative outwith a set of rigid written procedures. Their primary function is to ensure that when the shit hits the fan they can claim that they followed procedures, thus ensuring they are not blamed.
Here is some free advice to these people:
1 Procedures cannot cover every eventuality.
2 In the unlikely event that procedures could ever cover every eventuality, the outcome resulting from rigidly following those procedures may still well be sub optimal.
Certain circumstances require people and organisations to look outside a rigid procedural framework and ask certain basic questions, eg "if we take this action how will it look to others (eg taxpayers) outside of our organisation?".
Clearly HMRC did not ask themselves this question.
Here is the full article, unedited:
"AS IF a National Audit Office report last month detailing 44 million missed telephone calls last year (47 percent of those made) didn't pose enough questions over HM Revenue & Customs' 'contact centres', the Eye has discovered some very unusual arrangements for choosing the people to run them.
HMRC's first call centre, and still one of its largest, is in East Kilbride, just outside Glasgow. Since June last year it has been managed by a certain Robert Bowering, a call centre veteran with firms including HSBC and call centre outsourcing firm beCogent Ltd. But his appointment at HMRC was far from his first encounter with the taxman.
At Linlithgow sheriff court in March, just three months before he started working at HMRC, Bowering had been made bankrupt… by HMRC!
Bowering's debt, the origins of which are not known, stands at £75,545, of which the Accountant in Bankruptcy (Scotland's insolvency service) officially estimates it will recover, er, precisely £0. So how did a man made bankrupt over unpaid tax land a job advising everybody else on their tax bills?
Mr Bowering was brought in - on higher pay than the normal level for his grade - by a personal friend of his: the department's director of contact centres, Linda Maslen. Until the Eye became interested, the two could be found as each other's 'friend' on their Facebook pages. They had worked at HSBC's firstdirect telephone banking business at the same time in the 1990s.
HMRC insists that, although Maslen had 'advocated' her chum's appointment, the correct procedures had then been followed taking into account 'the risks posed by appointing someone who is insolvent, and the organisation's ability to manage those risks'.
So that's all right, then."
Tax does have to be taxing.
Professional Cover Against the Threat of Costly TAX and VAT Investigations
TAXWISE is a tax-fee protection service that will pay up to £75,000 towards your accountant's fees in the event of an HM Revenue & Customs full enquiry or dispute.
Tax Investigation for Dummies, by Nick Morgan, provides a good and easy to read guide for anyone caught up in an HMRC tax investigation. A must read for any Self Assessment taxpayer.
Official figures reveal that the number of personal bankruptcies triggered by HM Revenue and Customs is expected to be almost 33,000 this year. In 2006-07, before the economic turmoil, the tax authorities bankrupted just 12,134 people.
Those of you who missed the Monday night screening of Tonight on ITV, where the incompetence of HMRC was exposed in all its "glory", can catch it again here:
One of the cases covered on the programme concerns Matt Matharu, a former cab driver from Kent, who was bankrupted by HMRC because HMRC refused to believe he had paid his taxes.
His problems started after he changed careers in 2000, to become a graphic designer.
Tax was deducted automatically from his salary, but although he told HMRC he was no longer self-employed, last year it sent him a bill for £12,000 based on his previous tax records.
Her Majesty's Revenue &Customs took him to court and, last August, he was officially made bankrupt. A month later HMRC finally admitted that it had made a mistake.
Mr Matharu was then given a revised tax bill.
Can you guess how mauch that was for?
88 pence!
The bankruptcy was overturned last month, but HMRC is still demanding £45 interest on the 88p, and over £2,000 in costs.
