Inland revenue

[Njugle]

Here's a cracker for you. A retiree i know received one of those slips from the post office saying that a letter had postage to pay on it and he would have to pay £1.40 and collect it from Lerwick. If that isn't annoying enough the letter turns out to be from HM Revenue and Customs, with no postage at all on it!

 

Upon opening the letter, it contained a letter stating that he must provide a tax return for last year - by the 31st of January, 6 days away! He received a letter last year saying that he , most likely, would not be required to provide any more tax returns, this one says the same after this one is completed.

 

All this incompetency put me at mind of an article recently published in the Readers Digest, which someone pointed out to me, that a recent legal case in which the owner of a building contractor business attempted to sue the Revenue for proven delays and errors that cost his business an estimated £500,000. The judgement handed down was extraordinary, because it outlines that no matter how lackadaisical the IR had been and how much the business had suffered, there was no duty of care on the IR's service and effectively they cannnot be sued.

There is no other public authority that has this immunity.

 

There are other cases in the same article, that i don't have time to type out, but the most shocking one involves a woman who received an erroneous tax bill which she contested, to the tune of about £1000. As it turned out she attempted correspondence with the wrong part of the Revenue and as a result the right department enforced the duty due and declared her bankrupt. The resulting insolvency case rang up a bill, legal and otherwise of £250,000, after which time she lost everything, including a £500,000 house and now lives in a hostel.

The bankruptcy was annulled on the grounds of unfairness, but any recourse as to the original case was void as seven years had now passed and the Revenue refuses to consider any case after 7 years!

 

So, the moral of the story is; they are entirely beyond reproach or the law, and you are guilty until proven innocent, and proving your innocence may cost you everything!

[Pooks]

I had a similar problem. They claimed I hadn't paid the tax from a return about 5 or 6 years ago. I ended up paying it, just for them to tell me that I still hadn't paid it. I was then told that it would end up in courts if I didn't pay it within 14 days. By this time the interest and charges that had been added to it meant that there was no way I could afford it.

 

I went through all of my records wasting a day or two if my time to find out that I had not only paid the taxes in question but I had paid them twice! I contacted the number they had given to me oly to be told that they can't check their records back that far and to contact another department. I contacted them. The (nice) lady that I spoke to took one look at it and said, "Oh!". She then informed me that she would need to check it out and get back to me. She duly returned the call later that day to tell me that my account was clear and I was due them nothing.

 

Had this been a big business then it would probably have been paid multiple times and gone unseen.

 

Tax return time again and I am not holding my breath that the same thing won't happen again.

 

Off to do some Tax Returns...

[trout]

Yeah - I'm also doing my tax return. Bollox.