After the George Floyd protests, the Treasury ditched its numerical reasoning test for prospective employees because it created an adverse impact on candidate diversity.
Did HMRC do the same?
DEI must DIE!
HMRC Is Shite (www.hmrcisshite.com), also available via the domain www.hmrconline.com, is brought to you by www.kenfrost.com "The Living Brand"
The Chancellor is asked by @NickyMorgan01 to reconsider his misleading statements to @CommonsTreasury about @LCAG_2019 and @loanchargeAPPG.— Loan Charge Action Group [LCAG] (@LCAG_2019) May 13, 2019
The government’s inability to be honest around the #LoanCharge is why a #LoanChargeReview is neededhttps://t.co/RVOkQyGB2z
"he understood what it was like to live on a zero-hours contract because he once worked as a £250-per-hour barrister."Quite!
"Because once your tax return is done on a digital basis, in a total revolutionary way, your ability to do nudges and sidecar versions of savings through a tax return will massively go through the roof.Unfortunately, as you can see, he wasn't speaking English and as such no one understood what the fuck he was talking about!
But that is for the future."
“Wouldn't it be so much easier if they [small businesses] could go to the local tax office with their accounts and have them check before submitting.”Yet HMRC have told us all that MTD will make things easier!!
"HMRC collected around £124bn in VAT last year – over a fifth of the UK's total tax take – and failed to collect around £12.6bn in VAT.Good luck getting straight answers from HMRC!
The reasons for why VAT is so vulnerable are somewhat opaque, so the committee will examine how this might be addressed.
Brexit may provide both opportunities and challenges to the UK's approach to VAT. The government may choose to stick to a broadly similar structure to what currently exists, change it, or abolish it completely.
We will examine the chief concerns for HMRC and businesses going forward, and what impact Brexit will have on HMRC's efforts to reduce the VAT element of the tax gap."
Treasury is going to waive the VAT on this weekend's Manchester benefit gig, I'm told
— Jennifer Williams (@JenWilliamsMEN) June 2, 2017
UK Treasury rejects call for tax expert input in #financebill debates https://t.co/zz4iRHP4DP— Andrew Goodall (@agoodall4) April 13, 2017
"Treasury Committee chairman Andrew Tyrie has written to the financial secretary to the treasury, Jane Ellison, requesting further detail on HMRC’s claim that the Making Tax Digital programme will cost only £280 per UK company to set up."
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PDF 215 KB) PDF 407 KB) PDF 433 KB)"There are huge differences between the FSB and HMRC about the administrative burden of Making Tax Digital. This is the heart of the matter. The FSB think that with MTD, businesses might spend three times as much time on their tax obligations as they currently do. This could cost them around £3,000 a year in time, salaries and accountants' fees. HMRC think that they will spend less time, leading to a small net saving. A comprehensive pilot should shed some light on which assumption is closer to reality.
This serves to illustrate the need for the implementation of one of the Committee's recommendations that a comprehensive pilot is needed to establish the facts, and before mandatory roll out of the digital regime. I have written to the Administrative Burdens Advisory Board to ask for a view on the basis of their members' extensive business and accountancy practice networks."In other words, Tyrie still doesn't believe the MTD hype!
@ken_frost 2/2 .. In the released documents KPMG undertook part of the research for HMRC, as a small biz tax adviser.... pic.twitter.com/eKKzNvrtzn— Kevin Reed (@Goonerreed) March 27, 2017
“If a tax avoidance scheme is found by the courts to be illegal, then investors in the scheme have no option but to repay the tax that they have avoided.However, fear not, HMRC says that everything is fair:
But HMRC needs to treat people fairly, including investors in what are now considered to be tax avoidance schemes, and to be transparent and timely in their approach....
This sorry story is a clear example of how tax reliefs aimed at achieving a specific policy objective — in this case to boost the UK film industry — can result in unacceptable complexity in the tax system providing scope for confusion and also some abuse. The result is that for many years HMRC have been involved in a long-running legal battle against avoidance schemes."
“We have worked hard to tackle abuse in the system on behalf of the vast majority of investors who play by the rules, ensuring they are enforced fairly and with sensitivity.”Nothing to see here!
“The compliance cost estimates are so far apart that at least one of them must be wrong. I have written to both the HM Treasury and the Federation of Small Businesses to ask for detailed supporting methodology for their estimates.I suspect that the FSB figure is closer to the mark, what say you?
If the FSB is right, the effects of Making Tax Digital would be crippling for many small businesses. If the government is right, businesses have something to gain in the longer term and one would expect them to be queueing up to join the pilot.”
"The committee has yet to see evidence strong enough to justify a threshold below the VAT threshold, £83,000. It may exist, but the government needs to assemble and publish it."Also, for good measure, the committee wants more substantive and wide ranging pilot schemes. In other words the committee knows that HMRC are trying to push this through without sufficient testing and feedback!
'The pilots need to be designed to gather information over the entire reporting cycle – four quarterly updates and an end of year reconciliation. These need to be evaluated before full implementation and parliament needs to see the evidence that this has been done."HMRC, in an effort to pass the financial buck, has repeatedly said that commercial software providers will have to provide free software for use by those who do not purchase accounting software.
"This is not a minor matter. These reforms will affect millions of taxpayers. Their cooperation and trust are both hard won and easily dissipated. Without them, more of the yield could be at risk than any putative extra revenue from MTD."MTD is a disaster waiting to happen!
"The prospect of HMRC making further cuts to spending on customer service will chill the blood of many taxpayers.
HMRC's recent performance in this area has been appalling for long periods and left members of the public counting the cost in time and money.
It is bad enough that people trying to pay their fair share of tax should have been kept waiting for so long.
But holding for HMRC's helpline has hit them in the pocket too - a serious concern for those on low incomes and a dismal message to send to small businesses, the self-employed and anyone else simply seeking advice.”
"HMRC has serious work to do before this committee is confident it can provide a consistent, efficient service that properly meets the needs of taxpayers and optimises tax revenue.An HMRC spokesman said:
Efforts to meet government spending targets must not come through ill-conceived measures that effectively penalise the people departments are intended to serve."
"This is an inaccurate, out of date reflection of our phone performance. We acknowledge that service levels in the early part of last year were not acceptable and we apologised at the time.Well then, nothing to worry about at all it's all lies then!
But the PAC is well aware our phone lines have since fully recovered and we are now offering our best service levels in years. Wait times are now below five minutes and customers consistently rate the support they receive on the phones as excellent.”
"It is limited by the pay cap.Adding:
But it does have a different salary scale and remuneration structure, so in that, we've been able to put together what we believe is a much more appropriate offer for people coming in from the private sector."
"I'm sure this will be an ongoing topic of conversation with the Treasury over the next few years."In other words this deal hasn't been agreed/signed off by the Treasury!
"This was them making a personal choice that they either wanted a career somewhere else or they found a different job with a current employer, or it was their moment to retire or go off to do something different.Maybe the civil service and the government needs to rethink how it rewards and retains people?
That level of attrition that we saw was actually lower than we expected – but in line with the industry standard."
“We do recognise that it is a problem for us. We visited Newcastle last Friday where this work takes place.
The records are essentially people’s national insurance records, which identify their employer and allow them to open up potential insurance claims against their employer for previous histories. The challenge we have is that these records go back several decades to when records were kept in a very different way. The majority of these records from before the mid-1970s are on microfiche.
The microfiche records from the 1940s and 1950s are very hard to access but we need to think about what we can do. The machines necessary to identify the issue aren’t made any more. We need to scour various parts of the internet to repair the machines in order to be able to provide the service.”I thought that part of HMRC's digital vision was to transfer old records into digital databases?
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| It's showtime folks! |
New HMRC permanent secretaries, Troup and Thompson, up before Treasury Committee this afternoon— Judith Freedman (@JudithFreedman) June 8, 2016
