Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs spent £140 million on a new computer system last year and according to the Chartered Institute of Taxation, has promptly issued 25 million coding notices with "a significant proportion of these wrong". The result is that the significant proportion of us will be paying too much tax to the Government for the next year.
Former jobs, already repaid underpayments from past years and old penalties have been re-introduced to this years code reducing the amount we can earn before being taxed as well as at the wrong rate and people alive and well wrongly being marked as deceased on their tax records.
Shambles doesn't begin to describe it but it seems that apart from a couple of short paragraphs on the HMRC website, far from publicising the problems, HMRC denies anything is seriously awry.
The onus, it seems, is being firmly placed on the taxpayer to check their code and ring up HMRC to get it looked at.
I don't know how many of us 25 million understand our complex tax system, but unless it comes with diagrams and an idiots guide, they may as well send me a page full of hieroglyphics as it would make as much sense.
I'm fortunate enough to have an Agent take care of all things tax for me but i'd confidently state that a good proportion of the 25m affected don't and will face hunting one down at their own expense to sort it out or face an hour on the phone on hold while the already stretched HMRC Contact Centre staff work there way through the deluge of calls.
I'm no IT expert but shouldn't all this have been thoroughly tested before it was introduced so monumental mistakes like this didn't happen to such an important and vital system? They spent millions on an advertising campaign to warn us of the penalties if we didn't send in our Tax Returns before the 31st January deadline so it's about time they dipped back into their pocket and made this more widely known.
Of course, if they did this it would be advertising their incompetence as well but as they are the same people who 'lost' 25 million child benefit records and 6500 pensioner details over the last few years, their incompetence is already widely known.
3 comments:
Lucy, is this the same government that you want to vest with the power to nationalize and run key (if not all) components of industry and commerce in the U.K? Just asking...
If the Inland Revenue was privatised then they'd still be taking as much money off us, only none of it would be accidental ;)
Yes Cody, it is. Can you spot the flaw in my plan?
Funny how all the mistakes are in their favour and never under charging us Cheezy.
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