HM Revenue and Customs, our tax authority, should, in my opinion, be present in every single town and city of the UK. But it isn’t.
At its simplest, the classification categorises each constituency and local authority according to the type of settlement in which the largest proportion of its population lives. To achieve this, settlements are classified according to an adjusted version of the taxonomy recently developed by the Centre for Towns:
12 Core Cities: twelve major population and economic centres (e.g. London, Glasgow, Sheffield)
24 Other Cities: other settlements with a population of more than 175,000 (e.g. Leicester, Portsmouth, Aberdeen)
119 Large Towns: settlements with a population between 60,000 and 174,999 (e.g. Warrington, Hemel Hempstead, Farnborough)
270 Medium Towns: settlements with a population between 25,000 and 59,999 (e.g. Gravesend, Jarrow, Exmouth)
674 Small Towns: settlements with a population between 7,500 and 24,999 (e.g. Falmouth, New Romney, Holbeach)
There should, therefore, be 1099 tax offices around the country. All staffed with some number of taxmans’ union members. Now, there’s value for money from those consultancy fees, right?
As it happens, quite gloriously, the 1099 form is the basic US income tax form. Now there’s serendipity for you.
“the taxonomy recently developed…”
Geddit?
He’s thinking too small. Why not a taxman for every taxpayer?
1099 tax offices around the country, presumably all empty, with the staff continuing to work from home in different parts of the country.
Does he explain why we need a vastly enlarged even more bureucratic Tax collection network?
I’d have though a much simpler tax system would do the job admirably. It would free up some wealth destroying adminstrative labour too for wealth generating activities.
When I think of looting England, I think of 1066 not 1099.
But of course I’m really old fashioned.
I think there’s something in his idea. We could easily accommodate 24 Revenue Inspectors in Darlington.
I counted the lamp-posts in the market square.
Cheer up, Bb. It wuz the Normans wot abolished slavery in England.
Sometimes this fat sack of shit (I won’t call him a sack of potatoes as I like potatoes) makes my blood boil. Has there ever been anyone who is so keen on tax for tax sake? He creams his tighty whiteys at the thought of shaking people down for more money.
Here’s an idea – a taxman in Ely taxing every word that is written or said by this utter cunt. Tax him until he begs for the lions to finish him off
He would have been perfectly at home in the DDR 1949 – 1990.
You’re thinking 1040, Timmy. The 1099 is important, but it is informational. It ain’t a tax return.
The basic US income tax form is form 1040, the individual income tax return.
Form 1099 (various suffixes) is for reporting various types of income from which income tax has not been deducted at-source – interest income, dividends, ASF.
So now you know . I wish I didn’t.
llater,
llamas
Addolff
Spot on – Indeed Erich Honecker used to comment over at his blog on a regular basis
HM Revenue and Customs, our tax authority, should, in my opinion, be blown to smithereens, the remains cast into the sea, and earth on which they stood sown with salt.
But I’m sure we can come to some kind of amicable compromise.
Oh, and by the way: it’s not our tax authority. Unless Spud thinks he’s the king now. (The clue’s in the name, mate.)
“HM Revenue and Customs, our tax authority, should, in my opinion, be present in every single town and city of the UK. But it isn’t.”
So move the existing staff out of expensive offices and housing in London. Since they are going to be underemployed with local work in their new locations they can answer the damned phone.
Ah, yes, well, close anyway…..
Is there any indication of what the extra 87,000 IRS agents funded by Biden46’s “Inflation Reduction Act” in 2022 have achieved to date?
Always assuming they’ve actually been recruited and this isn’t just a case of $80bn being squirrelled away before being re-directed towards political allies when nobody’s looking.
HM Revenue and Customs, our tax authority, should, in my opinion, be present in every single town and city of the UK. But it isn’t.
Why am I reminded of the immortal words of the Great Roger Daltrey – ‘Well tell me who are you?’ Obviously he is entitled to his opinion, but it’s the assumption that its more worthwhile than anyone else that grates.
When I started work as a tax practitioner in the 1980s, there was literally a tax office for almost every London borough, and every single UK city had one or more of what were called tax districts.
I watched an episode of a new BBC comedy, Mammoth which is postulated around a man from 1979 being transported back to the present day via being recovered from an avalanche. Although not a classic it at least raised a laugh on a couple of occasions which is as much as I c an hope for from a BBC production these days. Interestingly, I’d be delighted to go back to the ‘rolling back the state’ agenda that went on in the 1980s. Huge swathes of Red tape repealed. A bonfire of controls and ‘Loadsamoney’ type people marauding through London’s streets. Sadly I doubt he has much else in mind from that decade.
In every one of those districts, there was somebody called a district inspector. A person of great experience who understood the local economy of that area and knew who the rogues were.
You could replace this with policeman, milkman , garage, bank manager – it’s like John Major from the 1990s.
There was a great advantage to having those officers. The knowledge that those local tax inspectors had, let them identify which accountants could be relied upon. And which couldn’t. Which people were by and large reliable, and those who seemed to be spawning lots of dubious businesses. They could also know that there were problem sectors in their economy which were peculiar to the area. For example, in a fishing port, there would be a particular problem with fishing boats. Unsurprisingly. And they could have expertise in those in a way that, well, another area would not.
The centralization drive has intensified in recent years across all areas. He’s harking back to a bygone age well before Multinationals even existed. What impact would this have on a lot of modern day businesses, which are largely based on importing products across vast distances? We have as many as 15 million potential ISIS/ Hamas terrorists in the country – does he imagine the state will be better at tracking businesses, especially those that are primarily virtual than it will people?
There was something else about having those local tax officers, which was really important. The local tax office could also provide taxpayers with face-to-face help. Quite literally, you could go in and say, “I have no idea what I’m doing. Can I please be assisted by you to fill in my tax return?” Or “Can you help me with understanding this piece of paper you’ve sent me”, or whatever it was. The taxpayer knew that they could get support from somebody who looked like a human being. That is no longer true.
You could make the same claim about vast swathes of the bureaucracy. The health service. The DVLA. Even the police to be honest. Why the focus on the Taxman – oh wait, Tim’s already answered that. Besides which most of the employees work full time from home and have done for 4 years, with ‘Mr. perpetual lockdowns’ full support. Is he pivoting to ‘living with the COVID risk’? Must be Thursday already.
In fact, it’s not even true that for much of the year now, HM Revenue and Customs is planning to have tax office helplines open. I know they’ve relented at this moment, but they haven’t guaranteed they’re going to keep those helplines open forever.
I presume he meant ‘closed’ instead of open. Wouldn’t this be a key indicator that the state’s remit needs to be radically reduced and public expenditure cut? Of course not – this is a totalitarian psychopath.
So, what we’ve moved to is a situation where literally the Revenue was seen to be present in the communities who were being expected to pay tax, and was there to provide people with assistance so they could do so, to a situation where now the Revenue is in around 14 large offices around the UK, and some people live literally hundreds of miles from tax offices.
Again this could be applied to swathes of the public sector. That is the reality of globalization and economies of scale. Technology has moved on from the mid 1980s.
People in Cornwall, have a very long way to travel if they want to get to Bristol, which is their nearest tax office. People in the Shetland Islands are nearly 400 miles from their nearest tax office in Edinburgh or Glasgow. Now those are extremes maybe, but it’s also true there isn’t a tax office in the whole of East Anglia.
I’d quite like the Charities commission to have an office in every major town, starting with Ely where it can investigate third sector bodies that are basically masquerading as independent charities while being funded 90% or more by the taxpayer. Several organizations in particular ‘Funding the future’, ‘The Fair Tax Mark’ and ‘The Green New Deal Group’ are suspected of being sock puppets.
There is there one in North Wales. This is ludicrous. People can’t get help, and unsurprisingly there’s a consequence.
That’s a feature not a bug. If you can’t get help you pay more tax without querying it.
Over the last few years we have seen the amount of tax going unpaid by small businesses in the UK skyrocketing. 30 per cent of the tax liabilities now owing by small companies in the UK aren’t paid. That’s according to the Revenue’s own figures.
Boddicker’s comment covers it to a far greater degree than I could
They say it’s only 18 per cent with regard to self-employed people, but frankly I think they’re being optimistic there because it’s not very long ago that that figure was also 30 per cent and I can’t see why it’s changed. So vast amounts of tax is not being paid.
There is no evidence behind these calculations – the tax burden is at the highest for decades. The very last thing we need is to be having an army of booted inspectors trying to extract more.
I believe that if we spent £1bn more a year on reopening local tax offices, which would increase the costs of running HM Revenue and Customers by 20 per cent per annum, from £5bn to approximately £6bn a year, we would however collect an extra £10bn of tax, simply because that local knowledge would guarantee that local inspectors would know where to get it.
More complete fantasy from someone whose connection with the real world, if it ever existed, disappeared probably alongside Breville toasted sandwich makers
And, those people who need help would also get the assistance they require.
Why wouldn’t you spend £1 billion to collect £10 billion extra in tax? That’s my question. And I don’t understand why they won’t do it.
Because there’s no evidence whatsoever that it would collect even a fraction of that and it would create yet more public sector militants whose overall cost in pension terms to the country would dwarf any additional revenue they create in pension rights alone
It’s time the Revenue was seen back in our towns and cities.
I’d sooner have police that tackle real crime and gangs of Hamas sympathisers and environmental terrorists but as Mick Jagger said: ‘You can’t always get what you want’
I’m going to have to disagree with you lot on this. For my sins i used to work in the tax office. Local offices served an important role in helping local people sort out their tax affairs. Tax enquiry centres helped thousands of people per year sort out their tax problems. Lots of old people found the service very useful. The government decided to close the tax enquiry centres and then the local offices. If you’ve got a tax problem you can try the phone line if you like hanging on for ever then to be connected to someone who knows less about tax coding than i do, or use the online portal which quite honestly is useless if your problem doesnt fit into very narrow parameters. Since leaving the revenue hmrc have consistenly buggered up my tax code and every year i have to make a complaint. If there was a local enquiry centre i could probably get the matter sorted out in 5 minutes (as long as whoever was manning it knew what they were doing) So Spud has a point, though we don’t need over a thousand tax offices (anyway all the experienced staff have been made redundant so they’ll be not enough staff to man them) What is needed are tax enquiry centres that are in reasonable travelling distance of most people, so that they can sort out their problems. In this matter most of you are just wrong in dismissing the role that local tax offices provided.
Moqifen
You exposed the fact that Murphy had a twin and I am convinced that’s who took his accountancy exam but that’s by the bye.
I tend to agree we could use more tax office locally but why specifically tax? We could probably use smaller more local hospitals – smaller more local police stations. The list goes on. Murphy’s sole concern is to tax more at a time when taxes are about 10% too high overall at the very least – and the state needs to be shrunk hugely. I agree having a local tax point (or better helplines at the very least) would be progress but that’s more a comment on the total incompetence of the public sector and the absurdity of Murphy’s plan, rather than rejecting the idea per se
The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.
The issue of not answering phones won’t be helped by redistribution.
There needs to be better response to enquiries not thousands more officers. The enquiries don’t go away because it takes an age to answer.
“a district inspector. A person of great experience who understood the local economy of that area and knew who the rogues were … identify which accountants could be relied upon. And which couldn’t. Which people were by and large reliable, and those who seemed to be spawning lots of dubious businesses. “
Doesn’t that sound like prejudice, jobs for the boys, and profiling? The sort of 1970s attitude in the police that led to a lot of injustice?
Moquifen @ 5.22 talking to a real person is normally the best solution and I suppose on reflection, someone with local knowledge may be able to sort problems better / quicker.
I recently worked as a contractor for my old company on an assignment (I retired a few years ago and get a pension). The pay etc was ‘managed’ by an agency who deducted all the PAYE stuff, but also ‘Employers NI, Pension contributions, holiday pay and Apprenticeship Levy from the day rate I agreed with the company.
It has now finished and no one knows where the employer pension contributions are and the agency
kept half the holiday pay because I didn’t ask for it, despite me telling them on day one I would not be taking any leave and me paying for it from the agreed rate.
I’m trying to get some answers from the agency (who don’t now answer my emails) and whilst there is some useful stuff on HMRC website I would like to speak to a living breathing tax official………
@adolff – I’m afraid you are going to be out of luck. There was various units dealing with the construction industry scheme and associated agency stuff, but these were all shut down. your best bet is to write a complaint letter to Jim Harra the head honcho in London. That usually provokes a response.
I’m surprised at the number of people on this site, who moan about excess taxation but are happy that many people especially the elderly are paying too much tax because they can’t access help from the revenue via enquiry centres. Most of the work on enquiry centres results in people paying less tax.
@VP – i doubt Jonathan took the potatoes exams for him.