Smiley!

The Mail on Sunday has caused a wee bit of a furore in the reserved ranks of the HMRC.

The paper reports that an anonymous group of HMRC staff posted a photo of themselves on Faecesbook wearing cardboard smiley faces.

Unfortunately for their hapless staff, HMRC ban employees from uploading material to social networking websites (HMRC worry about their "brand value").

To make matters worse, the above video was also posted onto the same Faecesbook page.

A witch hunt is now on.

The page now seems to have been taken down.

Tax does have to be taxing.

Professional Cover Against the Threat of Costly TAX and VAT Investigations

What is TAXWISE?

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.

To find out more, please use this link Taxwise

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.

Click the link to read about: Tax Investigation for Dummies

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"

Flawed Tool!

The Low Incomes Tax Reform Group (LITRG) are marginally unimpressed with HMRC's new website tool ("Do I Qualify?") that is meant to calculate whether an individual qualifies for tax credits.

LITGR claim that HMRC's tool is flawed, and that it produces the wrong answer in many cases.

LITRG claim that errors appear when income for 2007/08 is less than the current year. The answer given appears to be based on the current year figure instead of the previous year's.

LITRG also claims that the tool does not account for those with disabilities, or those who might be entitled to the 50 plus element of working tax credit and people who work 30 hours a week.

HMRC have partially addressed the problem, by adding an extra step for those with disabilities.

Tax does have to be taxing.

Professional Cover Against the Threat of Costly TAX and VAT Investigations

What is TAXWISE?

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.

To find out more, please use this link Taxwise

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.

Click the link to read about: Tax Investigation for Dummies

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"

HMRC's Coding Enigma IV

Despite attempts by HMRC to pass the burden of responsibility for identifying coding errors onto the hapless taxpayer, the buck cannot be so easily passed.

Accountancy Age reports that UK200Group (the foremost mutual association of quality assured independent accountants and lawyers serving the SME business sector) has delivered a scathing assessment of HMRC's incompetence and hypocrisy over this issue.

They are quoted:

"The new system has wrongly calculated how much employers should deduct from salaries, while company cars and private health insurance could be taxed twice."

Also, as noted on this site last week, more than 500,000 people who are claiming a state pension for the first time during the current tax year could have too much tax deducted from their income, and married couples and civil partners aged 76 or over could lose an allowance worth nearly £700.

David Whiscombe, a director of BKL Tax and a member of the UK200Group tax panel, really lets loose at HMRC:

"Every person and every organisation makes mistakes from time to time, but there are two things which are disquieting in this story.

The first is that HMRC say that 'the transition to the new system has brought to light some discrepancies in our existing records'.

This indicates a worrying lack of testing before data was switched over to the new system.

As it is, they don't seem to have been aware of the possibility of a problem until they started getting complaints from the public.

The second problem is HMRC's reaction, which is broadly that taxpayers should check the coding notices carefully for themselves and tell HMRC.

Actually, HMRC, just correcting your errors when they are pointed out to you isn't good enough. When a taxpayer makes a mistake, HMRC are increasingly looking to exact penalties.

So what about penalising HMRC for making errors – perhaps by providing for automatic compensation for any taxpayer affected by the mistake? Or do 'penalties for careless errors' only work one way?"

HMRC responded:

"HMRC acknowledges that a significant number of coding notices are incorrect because the data carried forward from the previous PAYE system does not match the data received from employers.

We are undertaking a review of those cases which are at most risk of error and will issue revised notices of coding to the individuals as soon as possible. This work is being prioritised so that we deal first with those individuals who are most vulnerable to the changes in their code numbers."

I assume that this is the manual review being conducted by staff (up to management level) over the next 6 weeks, that a loyal reader mentioned in a recent comment?

Had HMRC followed good practice wrt new systems implementation (eg parallel running), this mess would not have happened.

As ever the taxpayer ends up bearing the burden of HMRC's incompetence.

Tax does have to be taxing.

Professional Cover Against the Threat of Costly TAX and VAT Investigations

What is TAXWISE?

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.

To find out more, please use this link Taxwise

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.

Click the link to read about: Tax Investigation for Dummies

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"

Front Page News II

I see it is also in the Scottish Express too by gad!

Tax does have to be taxing.

Professional Cover Against the Threat of Costly TAX and VAT Investigations

What is TAXWISE?

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.

To find out more, please use this link Taxwise

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.

Click the link to read about: Tax Investigation for Dummies

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"

Front Page News

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.

Your wish has now been granted!

It is now on the front page of the Scottish Sun.

Quote:

"A source at Centre 1 said:

'News of his court case has been the talk of the office.How he managed to land this job so soon after being made bankrupt is a mystery'."

Quite!

Tax does have to be taxing.

Professional Cover Against the Threat of Costly TAX and VAT Investigations

What is TAXWISE?

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.

To find out more, please use this link Taxwise

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.

Click the link to read about: Tax Investigation for Dummies

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"

HMRC's Coding Enigma III

HMRC's coding problems continue apace.

It has emerged that, on top of the millions of incorrect tax codes that are being sent out by HMRC, HMRC are double taxing the value of benefits such as car and health insurance provided by employers.

Married couples and civil partners aged 76 or more might lose an allowance worth nearly £700.

Additionally over 500,000 people, who started claiming their state pension this tax year, could automatically have too much tax deducted from their income next tax year.

Went the day well at HMRC?

Tax does have to be taxing.

Professional Cover Against the Threat of Costly TAX and VAT Investigations

What is TAXWISE?

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.

To find out more, please use this link Taxwise

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.

Click the link to read about: Tax Investigation for Dummies

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"